USA, in Biden’s withdrawal the winner is also Musk. And the social networks –

US President Joe Biden has bypassed traditional media to announce his decision to withdraw from the race for the White House and has chosen to post the letter in which he communicated his choice on ‘X’. A victory for social media, underlined Elon Musk, who highlighted that «White House collaborators learned that Biden had dropped out of the race by reading X». In a series of posts shared in the hours following Biden’s announcement, Musk wanted to underline the role of social networks as a direct channel for reporting on world events in a more agile way than news sites or television and radio networks. The Tesla founder then invited leaders to «publish directly» on X and «not to cede the role to intermediaries». Of course, «mistakes can be made, but this shows that everything is real. People want authenticity».

Biden’s decision to entrust X, and at the same time Instagram, with his historic decision highlights how social media has become the primary vehicle for news for American voters in a particularly chaotic election campaign. The response from the online public to Biden’s letter was evident, with over 180 million views and more than 700,000 likes in the first two hours it was online. His Instagram post received over 1.1 million likes. X has thus emerged as a primary source for Americans, increasingly interested in receiving up-to-the-minute news quickly. Even more so in the last week, which began with the assassination attempt on former US President Donald Trump, continued with growing Democratic calls for Biden to step aside, and with a very spectacular Republican National Convention that confirmed Trump, as was expected. And culminated in Biden’s announcement that he was stepping aside.

“The last week has solidified the dominant role that social media has in political communications and breaking news,” Katie Harbath, a former director of public policy at Facebook who is now head of global affairs at Duco Experts, a technology consultancy, told The Washington Post. “It costs money, but it’s the most efficient way to get news to the most people as quickly as possible,” she said. Biden wasn’t the only one to turn to social media to quickly share news about him. Trump also gave his first response to the assassination attempt on his social media platform Truth Social, where he later announced his choice of Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio as his running mate. So much so that X CEO Linda Yaccarino posted on the social network that that’s “where history happens.”