Canadian Conservatives Were the Winners After Musk’s X Takeover

Federal Conservative politicians are seeing much higher engagement on social media than Liberal or NDP politicians, a boost that can mostly be attributed to Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter in 2022.

Researchers at the Media Ecosystem Observatory say engagement with federal Conservative politicians has increased by 52 per cent since Musk bought Twitter and changed the name to X.

The increase can’t be explained by “the relative popularity of the Conservative party or usage trends on X by Conservative partisans,” they say.

The Media Ecosystem Observatory, or MEO, is a collaboration between McGill University and the University of Toronto that studies media ecosystem health.

MEO researchers have been tracking how Canada’s information ecosystem has been shifting, and their latest report covers the past three years, from Jan. 1, 2022, to Nov. 30, 2024.

In that time period, Musk purchased Twitter and changed the platform to amplify right-wing viewpoints, fired most of the employees who worked on the platform’s trust and safety team and reinstated many accounts that had been previously banned, including white nationalists and accounts that spread misinformation.

Musk, who poured almost $300 million into re-electing Donald Trump and other Republican candidates, often amplifies conspiracy theories and far-right accounts — including white supremacist accounts — using his own 219-million-follower X account.

That three-year period also saw a major shakeup in how Canadians find news and media outlets.

In August 2023, Meta’s platforms — Facebook and Instagram — started blocking Canadian news organizations and individuals from posting links to news. The news ban was in response to Canadian legislation that requires Google and Meta to pay news publishers for their content.

MEO’s latest analysis finds that Conservative MPs are getting 61 per cent more engagement on Facebook, Instagram and X compared with Liberal and NDP MPs, figures that could be partially explained by the Conservatives’ rising popularity with Canadians, which has also shown up in opinion polls.

Taking a closer look at Instagram, MEO researchers found that a more recent boost in engagement on Instagram for Conservatives can be credited to the growth in popularity of leader Pierre Poilievre’s Instagram account.

But when it comes to X, the researchers say that growing popular support for the Conservatives can’t account for the 52 per cent increase in monthly engagement for Conservative accounts after Musk’s takeover.

“Our results corroborate with global trends that show how politicians and users who identify with the political right are thriving on the platform,” according to MEO’s report.

One platform Conservatives are not doing particularly well on is TikTok, the short-form video app that uses a powerful algorithm to deliver videos in a steady stream to users. Liberal MPs are having more success with TikTok, while Conservatives have gravitated to YouTube for video content. But Liberal and NDP politicians and partisans are also seeing former Twitter readers leaving that platform, leading to a drop-off in engagement.

This analysis doesn’t include Bluesky, a Twitter-like platform that has grown in popularity, especially with users on the centre-to-left side of the political spectrum.

When it comes to how Canada’s news media have adjusted to being blocked on Meta platforms, the MEO researchers found that major news organizations have mostly replaced Facebook and Instagram with TikTok. Between January 2022 and July 2024, TikTok engagement had grown from 4.6 per cent of total engagement to 73.5 per cent for news media posts.

MEO studied six news organizations it considers to be politically “centrist”: CBC, CTV, Global, Le Journal de Montréal, La Presse and the Toronto Star.

But the nature of TikTok — where videos that perform well on the algorithm can go viral — is leading news organizations to put out a smaller number of posts on fewer topics. For the news organizations MEO included in its analysis, 1,541 posts made up 50 per cent of engagement in January 2022. By July 2024, only 17 posts got 50 per cent of engagement. This means news consumers may be exposed to fewer topics and less variety of news stories.

The MEO analysis also found that smaller news organizations haven’t been able to get the same engagement numbers on TikTok as larger news companies.

The MEO researchers also took a look at the right-wing media organizations Rebel News, the Post Millennial, the Toronto Sun and True North, finding that these outlets had little to no engagement on TikTok. Right-wing media have found increasing engagement on YouTube and on X.

Overall, MEO’s analysis found that Conservatives have been the winners in Canada’s new information landscape.

And the researchers say that Musk’s purchase of X has both amplified right-wing voices and “facilitated misinformation and hate speech.”