Cutting out the middleman? Elon Musk and the rhetoric of citizen journalism in platform-mediated communication
arXiv:2610.40675 · doi:10.3389/fcomm.2026.1901417
Abstract
This article examines how Elon Musk constructed discourse about journalism and the media on X between the 2024 United States presidential election and Donald Trump's presidential inauguration. It investigates how references to journalism, media organisations, and platform-based communication were articulated within Musk's posts, and how users responded to these narratives during a period of intense political polarisation. The study combines computational classification, qualitative thematic coding, and inferential statistical analysis. A corpus of 2,906 posts published by Musk between 5 November 2024 and 20 January 2025 was compiled. From this corpus, 500 posts referring to journalism, media organisations, platforms, or media-related discourse were identified through AI-assisted filtering and subsequent manual review. In addition, 42,066 user responses were analysed from a stratified sample drawn from 3,233,112 interactions. The analysis examined patterns of agreement and disagreement with Musk's stance and their relationship with thematic, gender, and professional variables inferred from publicly available profile information. The findings show that Musk's discourse is organised around three recurrent dynamics: criticism of institutional journalism, the association of media organisations with political and ideological agendas, and the presentation of X as an alternative communicative space. Journalism is predominantly framed through accusations of bias, disinformation, propaganda, and electoral manipulation, whereas X is more often linked to participation, innovation, and direct communication. User responses largely converged with Musk's position, although disagreement remained visible. While thematic orientation and professional background showed statistically significant associations with agreement patterns, effect sizes were limited.
arXiv comment13 pages, 5 figures, 4 tables