Elon Musk attacks the media nearly three times per day on X

"The New York Timesis pure propaganda." "Legacy media lies.""You are the media now." These are just a few examples of the anti-press rhetoric found in the 1,027 posts from Elon Musk's X account - which has over 227 million followers - that RSF analysed, which comes to an average of nearly three attacks on the media per day. RSF extracted posts published by Elon Musk's account, read them to assess their content, and retained only the ones critical of the media. The average pace of these posts points to a well-established tactic, which combines insults with the delegitimisation of professional news media.

Whether in his own posts, replies, reposts, or rquote postst, Elon Musk repeatedly accuses the media of being vectors of "disinformation," or of falling victim to a "woke mind virus", or of being "the propaganda wing of the Democrat Party."More than one-third of the posts analysed by RSF suggest that the media misinform the public. In response, the entrepreneur presents X, his own social network, as an "antidote."

Notably, the rate of posts peaked in the period leading up to the November 2024 US presidential election. In one week, Elon Musk - then an ardent supporter of candidate Trump - posted or reposted 58 attacks on the media. He wrote that the "legacy media" were guilty of "far-left propaganda"and of interfering in elections. Elon Musk does not limit his anti-press content to US news. In January 2025, as part of an online campaign against the government of UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Musk accused the mediaof having covered up mass rapes committed by "migrant gangs."According to him, "a quarter million little girls" have been and continue to be victims of these rapes - a figure that rests on no factual basis and that fact-checking outlets cannot corroborate. He alludes to British child-sex-abuse cases that were, in fact, covered by the press, such as the infamous cases in Bristoland Newcastle. Born in South Africa during apartheid, a country where racial inequalities remain acute, Elon Musk reproaches South African news outlets for failing to cover what he calls a "white genocide"happening in the country, referring to farmers that have been killed. This claim, which has also been repeated by Donald Trump, is factually incorrect. Neither statistical inquiries on the subject- which have been reported by the media - nor rulings by South African courtssubstantiate the existence of such a phenomenon.

Elon Musk's attacks often take the form of slogans that easily stick in people's minds, spread virally and amount to smear campaigns against the media. He repeated "defund NPR," to undermine funding for the US public radio network; used "AP stands for Associated Propaganda,"to discredit the Associated Press; and spread "New York Timesis pure propaganda," to target one of the United States' leading dailies.. These short catchphrases, constantly repeated and presented as universal truths, serve as mottos, reinforcing the idea that legacy media are fundamentally dishonest or beholden to higher interests.

X as the only alternative to the media

In parallel with these attempts to discredit professional outlets, Elon Musk highlights accounts he labels "citizen journalism," some of which have been flagged by the watchdog NewsGuard as spreaders of disinformation, such as End Wokeness- an account that pledges to fight "woke ideology" - or Libs of TikTok, which promises "news you can't see anywhere else." Of the posts RSF analysed, 50.8 per cent are quote posts of these types of accounts.

Attacking professional outlets while simultaneously promoting X content producers are the two complementary pillars of a strategy that Elon Musk has now openly acknowledged: turn X into a direct alternative to "legacy media." Elon Musk regularly celebrates X's placement at the top of app-store rankings ahead of news media apps, his favourite targets.

An industrial and economic project

Elon Musk's ideological campaign goes hand in hand with his business project: build a news platform based on distributing content produced by influential accounts on X. His favoured slogan, repeated since 2024 - "You are the media now" - sums up this philosophy. The goal is no longer to provide access to information produced by journalists, but to turn every user into a content producer, their work presented as the equivalent to that of seasoned journalists.

This type of project is impossible without substantial financing, and many advertisers fled the network after the 2022 takeover. But in 2025, X filed a lawsuit against leading international advertising organisations, accusing them of organising a "boycott."In the same year, for the first time since Musk became owner, the social network's advertising revenues returned to growth, suggesting his project may endure.