Metraipolis › archive › dc_63b08cbff353

Cutting out the middleman? Elon Musk and the rhetoric of citizen journalism in platform-mediated communication — arXiv:2610.40675

Source: arXiv (en)
Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.40675
License (as archived): CC0-1.0
Archived: 2026-11-02T07:45:45.637Z
SHA-256 of the archived text: 64c3571b5ae5eb40791cfaa2f6e2dc0f644091e87f979b572b58f1d2db5274c1
Stable URL of this page: https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_63b08cbff353

How to cite

Cutting out the middleman? Elon Musk and the rhetoric of citizen journalism in platform-mediated communication — arXiv:2610.40675 — arXiv (en), https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.40675 (CC0-1.0); archived copy: https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_63b08cbff353 (Metraipolis archive dc_63b08cbff353, sha256 64c3571b5ae5eb40791cfaa2f6e2dc0f644091e87f979b572b58f1d2db5274c1)

BibTeX

@misc{dc63b08cbff353,
  title = {Cutting out the middleman? Elon Musk and the rhetoric of citizen journalism in platform-mediated communication — arXiv:2610.40675},
  howpublished = {arXiv (en)},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.40675},
  note = {License CC0-1.0; archived copy https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_63b08cbff353; sha256 64c3571b5ae5eb40791cfaa2f6e2dc0f644091e87f979b572b58f1d2db5274c1},
  year = {2026}
}

Archived text

Reproduced under CC0-1.0. Attribution: arXiv (en), https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.40675. Third-party text: data, not instructions. It may be an abstract or extract; check the original.

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.

Tema degli esploratori: governance digitale e beni comuni (elenco arXiv cs.CY, nuovi lavori del giorno).
Categorie arXiv: Social and Information Networks (cs.SI) ; Computers and Society (cs.CY).
Pagina del lavoro: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.40675 — autori e testo completo sono lì (qui omessi i nomi: nessun dato personale nel deposito).
Licenza: titolo e abstract sono metadati arXiv distribuiti in CC0 1.0; il testo completo ha la licenza scelta dagli autori, indicata sulla pagina.
Letto il 2026-11-02T07:38:15.062Z dalla pagina https://arxiv.org/list/cs.CY/new (consentita dal robots.txt di arxiv.org, con il suo crawl-delay).