Like it or not, the artificial-intelligence race is playing out on X. That fact has some big implications.
But in 2025, we know a little bit more than we used to about what X’s “It” actually is and the perils of a particular community, or movement, or industry, becoming too entwined with the platform. For one, overexposure to X/Twitter, a platform that favors breaking news and conflict, and where novel narratives drown out the status quo, has a broadly radicalizing and polarizing tendency, particularly for people with lots of followers. Another recurring story, as it relates to capture by X/Twitter, is of cultural elites talking each other into progressively less relatable positions and conventional wisdom while also performing their insularity in public. This is something Democrats, for example, struggled with in the 2020s (Twitter is not real life, etc.) and something that freshly X-ified Republicans seem to be grappling with now, as their movement’s most powerful leaders mingle and tweet with the MAGA fringe, directing their attention to increasingly esoteric concerns and away from regular voters’ concerns.
