Under New Stewardship: Affective–Algorithmic Dynamics of Conspiracy Memes on X during the 2024 US Election

What happens when a billionaire buys the world’s digital public square and starts laundering conspiracy theories? This article examines Elon Musk’s use of memes and AI-generated images on X (formerly Twitter) following his October 2022 acquisition of the platform. It investigates how image-based posts during the 2023–24 US election cycle engaged with conspiratorial narratives and positioned them within the platform’s attention economy. Drawing on a corpus of 132 posts referencing disinformation, hoaxes or conspiracy theories, the study conducts a multimodal analysis of a purposive subsample clustered into six themes: COVID-19 and vaccine scepticism, the Springfield pet-eating hoax, Anthony Fauci mugshots, Pizzagate, QAnon and climate-change denial. Each post is coded for compositional features (imagery, typography, colour and intertextual references) and narrative strategies (humour, irony, nostalgia and paradoxical text). The analysis identifies three recurring strategies in Musk’s posting: softening conspiratorial claims through humour and irony; appropriating familiar cultural texts to lend them unwarranted legitimacy; and generating dissonance via paradoxical captions and visuals. Introducing the Affective – Algorithmic Memetic Circulation framework, the article links close visual analysis to changes in moderation and engagement-driven recommendation under Musk’s ownership, offering a transferable approach for studying multimodal conspiracy content in algorithmic environments.