Weekly Scroll: X-ocracy Now

The government is now run by Elon Musk's X

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Weekly Scroll! Today we’re talking about how Elon Musk leveraged X to blow up a congressional spending deal, YouTube’s failed war against ad blockers, how PR firms are using social media to manage scandals, and more!

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Onto the post!

Elon’s New Conservative Media Reality

Since Elon Musk bought Twitter, there have been a lot of folks very eager to declare that this new Muskified version of Twitter no longer matters. It’s losing users, all the cool posters left, it doesn’t have the same cultural sauce as it used to, it’s a ghost town.

There are some ways in which that’s correct. Users have been going down, the company is losing money like crazy, many great posters did leave. But I regret to tell you that Musk’s X absolutely still has the sauce. It’s just not the kind of sauce it used to have, and not the kind of sauce anyone sane should want it to have. X is still massively influential. And we saw that last week as a bipartisan bill to fund the government was blown up purely by conservative posters on X, Elon Musk chief among them.

The basic story here is that Congress entered last week needing to pass a bill to avoid a government shutdown - the federal government was only funded through Friday. There was a widely agreed upon bipartisan bill in place, and had that bill come up for a vote early in the week it would have passed. Until Elon Musk intervened.