Republican views on the social media platform X have “dramatically” changed since 2021, according to a new survey from the Pew Research Center.
The share of Republicans who said X is mostly good for democracy has more than tripled over the past three years, jumping from 17 percent in 2021 to 53 percent in 2024, the survey found.
The portion of GOP users who said the platform is mostly bad for democracy fell more than 40 percentage points in the same period, from 60 percent to 13 percent.
Democratic views on X have moved in the opposite direction since 2021, although the shift has been less prominent than their Republican counterparts.
The share of Democrats who said the platform is good for democracy fell 21 percentage points over the past three years, from 47 percent to 26 percent, while those who said it is bad ticked up 11 points, from 28 percent to 39 percent, according to the survey.
This shift has notably occurred since Elon Musk took over the platform, then known as Twitter, in late 2022.
Following his acquisition of the company, Musk quickly rolled back various content moderation policies and reinstated previously banned accounts – moves that have largely been popular with conservatives and opposed by liberals.
Despite the partisan split on X, most users overall — 38 percent — said the platform is good for democracy.
Unlike X, most users on other social media platforms, like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, did not view the sites as having a significant impact on democracy.
More than half of Instagram users — 56 percent — said the platform has no impact on democracy, while just under half of TikTok users — 49 percent — said the same, the Pew survey found.
Some 43 percent of Facebook users similarly did not see the site as having an impact on democracy, compared to the 31 percent who said it was mostly bad and the 24 percent who said it was mostly good.
The Pew Research Center survey was conducted between March 18 and 24 with 10,287 adult internet users in the U.S. and has a margin of error of 1.5 percentage points.
