The Great Sysop: Elon Musk, X, and the emergence of platform illiberalism

This article discusses Twitter’s mutation into X under Elon Musk, analyzing its shift from a mainstream platform to a far-right-aligned space. Through a novel conceptualization of institutional change in Trust and Safety, and an analysis of a dataset of over 1500 events related to X’s organizational transformation, we argue that three processes came to characterize X’s approach to content moderation: the political simplification of Twitter’s governance ecosystem, the centralization of power in Musk’s hands, and the repurposing of existing governance mechanisms to enforce Musk’s personal ideology. Together, these processes instantiated what we call platform illiberalism , an emerging regime whereby illiberal-esque logics reshape speech control internally while supporting illiberal actors externally. As such, X represents a unique fusion of social media and authoritarianism, with close ties to and potential implications for democratic erosion in the United States and beyond.