X Is a Power Problem, Not a Platform Problem
Happy 2026 everyone. The world’s richest man runs a subscription service to remove the clothing from photographs of children, and I don’t know how to write about it. It’s been just over a week and the global order has already drastically changed, in ways that affect everything, including how open social protocols understand themselves.
Remember 2023 and 2024? When every time Musk did something bad, people got excited because that would lead to Elon Musk Events, with signup waves to Mastodon and Bluesky? And when ‘bad’ was understood be frivolous things like DMs not working? Now in 2026, when ‘bad’ means generating CSAM and NCII on-demand at industrial scale, it’s crickets, and there is no initiative at all to leave the platform anymore. Society is going through the motions of vocal condemnation, pointing at agencies who should enforce something, but then not enforcing anything. It is clear now that actually leaving X is a step too far and unthinkable.
On January 3rd, US forces bombed Caracas, captured Maduro and his wife, and killed at least 80 people. Trump posted photos from a makeshift situation room at Mar-a-Lago showing the raid being monitored in real time. In the situation room photos, visible on the big screen behind Defense Secretary Hegseth, was an X feed showing search results for ‘Venezuela’. Another photo showed the OSINTdefender account on the screen. Few things illustrate the current role of X in our society as well as the heads of the most powerful military in the world, monitoring the X account of OSINTdefender while the CIA director sat next to them in the room.
Grok’s latest update allows people to generate sexualized images of women and children on demand, at industrial scale, generating multiple such images per second. Everyone is aware that this is happening, and continues to happen, as nobody is willing to stop it. Musk’s attitude is to use the crying-laughing emoji on complaints is an indication of how serious he takes the issue. Politicians have universally condemned it in words, calling it unacceptable. What is so maddening, however, is that their actions say otherwise. Governments all around the world are very clearly afraid of picking a fight with Elon Musk and a belligerent US regime.
This fear by politicians is further accentuated by the raid on Venezuela and Maduro’s kidnapping, which shows that the US is now a rogue state that does not care in the slightest about adhering to any forms of law. With realistic further threats being made to annex Greenland by the US, it is in fact understandable why politicians are afraid to take actions against the richest man in the world. When the UK said it might potentially think about enforcing its own laws against X, a US congresswoman threatened to sanction not just Starmer but ‘Britain as a whole,’ calling enforcement ‘a political war against Elon Musk.’ X is both protected by US state power, as well as being a source of US state power.
This widespread societal resignation of ‘guess our government communications now happens on a deepfake porn site’ is maddening, but also points to a deeper issue. We’re used to describing X as a platform, and analyse X accordingly. The photos of X being on the big screen while coordinating the Maduro raid is an indication that X acts as the infrastructure for power, the glue that connects the neo-royalty.
But the refusal of governments around the world to do anything about the CSAM and NCII generation machine, and how other countries get bombed and their leaders kidnapped because it creates content for X, shows that X is about power, and less about a platform.
When Elon Musk took over Twitter late 2022, alternative open social networks gained prominence, and platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky presented themself as alternatives to Twitter’s function as the digital public square. Both networks understood that there was an issue with the idea of having a single platform as a public square, and thus did not copy Twitter fully, but put their own spin on it.
The fediverse and Mastodon focused on there not being a single public square at all, but instead many digital places and communities that interconnect with each other. For Bluesky the solutions were aimed at giving users more control, with composable moderation and custom algorithmic feeds.
What this framing missed however is that Twitter also stopped being the digital public town square, in the years since Musk’s acquisition. Instead, it became the internal coordination space for a political faction that now controls state power. People still treat X as if it is still 2015, pretending it is the town square and using it for everything from talking about sports news to keeping up to date on pop culture. This lends validation and legitimation to X’s new role, facilitating the power of the neo-royalty.
The neo-royalty is the small network of political, capital, and tech elites centered on Trump, and X is their coordination infrastructure. Because they are rapidly gaining power around the world, and are in full control of the world’s military hegemon, you cannot separate yourself from this power infrastructure that X has become. Leaving X does not insulate or protect yourself from the warping effects it has on global power. This goes for both the large geopolitical aspects (see Greenland), and the local impacts, as the Somali families in Minnesota who lost their childcare funding because of a viral X video weren’t on X.
The implicit theory behind the open social web was that platform quality would determine outcomes. Build something that’s better, and in combination with the incumbent getting worse, this would lead to such difference in quality, user experience and safety that at some point people would switch from X to alternatives like Mastodon or Bluesky. This theory held up for a while in 2023 and 2024. In 2025 it started to falter, as Musk aligned himself with Trump, the signup waves to the alternative platforms effectively stopped. In early 2026, this theory is now really over, because X has fundamentally changed. Mastodon and Bluesky are not in competition anymore with the platform X, because X has changed. It changed from being a platform to the power structure for the neo-royalty, with the public square shambling along as a zombie, animated by everyone who still treats X like it’s 2015.
You cannot out-compete ‘where the ruling faction radicalizes and coordinates’ by having better moderation policies or algorithmic choice. X is not a platform problem anymore, it is a power problem, and building a different platform does not solve the power problem.
Other countries will need to leave the platform to untangle themselves from this dependency, and reduce its legitimacy. But the functioning of the neo-royalty is such that other governments taking actions against X will be taken as an offensive action by the US regime, that will likely trigger extensive retaliation. No country seems to be willing to be the first one to move to take action and thus take the brunt of the counter-offense of the regime.
We’re now at a strange stand-off, where it is extremely clear it is unacceptable what X is doing, and governments make a lot of noise about how upset they are, without daring to pull the trigger on taking action. Everyone is waiting on everyone else to take the first move.
This leads to three possible outcomes:
no government dares to take action, and they keep to calling things “completely unacceptable” while accepting the actual situation. Things stay as they currently are, and the world keeps sliding into a more dangerous and harmful place.
One government takes action against X, and the US regime retaliates so hard that no other government will dare to do meaningful enforcement against the massive harms created by X.
One government takes enforcement action against X, creating a permission structure for other governments to also take actions.
All three options have a meaningful impact on the open social web. For the first two outcomes, it further cements X as the place of power for the neo-royalty, further cementing its dominance in the political sphere. This position of power is also what prevents the alternative open networks to become a place of political power in it’s own right. The third option, of mass enforcement, is what creates an opening for open social networks to not just be an alternative, but to be a source of political power as well.
I do not know what the outcome will be, and with how rapidly the world has been changing I do not know which option is likely either. It’s easy to be highly cynical, and that point of view has been extensively validated over the years, but I do choose to hold to hope that we can build a better, more ethical, social internet out of the toxic waste ground of the current state of the internet.
https://connectedplaces.online/reports/a-power-problem-not-a-platform-problem/
