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Profiling Elon Musk's Twitter/X evolution: Political Thought, Public Persona and Influence

Authors: Jones, Marc; Mikros, George;

Profiling Elon Musk's Twitter/X evolution: Political Thought, Public Persona and Influence

Abstract

This report examines the evolution of Elon Musk’s Twitter (now X) presence from 2010 to early 2025, analyzing his posting behavior, ideological shifts, emotional tone, and influence on public discourse. We used advanced computational text analysis techniques, including emotion detection, personality profiling (Big Five model), and political ideology classification. We traced how Musk's communication style transformed from predominantly neutral and technology-centric discourse into a more politically engaged and emotionally charged presence. The study highlights key trends, such as increased ideologically polarized content, heightened engagement patterns for controversial posts, and shifts in personality traits correlated with significant real-world events. Two accompanying datasets support the analysis: Elon Musk Complete Tweet History (2010–2025): This dataset contains Musk's entire tweet history from June 4, 2010, to January 24, 2025. Each tweet is annotated for emotion (anger, joy, fear, etc.) and personality traits using the Big Five model (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism). Political Ideology Subsample: This dataset is a filtered subset of the complete tweet history, containing only tweets longer than 49 characters. These tweets are further annotated with political-ideological thematic labels, classifying them into categories based on left-wing, right-wing, and neutral themes. Our findings suggest that Musk’s ideological leanings became more pronounced over time, with right-wing content gaining dominance post-2022. Furthermore, emotional intensity—particularly anger and fear—correlates strongly with engagement, indicating a potential feedback loop between controversial statements and audience interaction. The report also examines Musk’s influence on Twitter’s algorithmic dynamics and the role of social media in amplifying politically charged discourse. The insights provided in this report contribute to the broader discourse on digital influence, social media polarization, and the evolving role of tech entrepreneurs in political and public communication. The report comes with two datasets in CSV files: Dataset 1: The Complete Musk Tweets (Emotion and Personality Annotation) [The Complete Musk_comprehensive (Emotion and Personality Annotation).csv]This dataset contains 60,567 tweets from Elon Musk, spanning from June 4, 2010, to January 24, 2025. Each tweet has been annotated with emotion and personality traits using a machine learning algorithm. The dataset provides a comprehensive view of Musk's online interactions, along with their emotional and psychological characteristics. Data Fields: text: The content of the tweet. characters: The character length of the tweet. target: The recipient or mentioned user in the tweet (if applicable). type: Whether the tweet is a reply, retweet, or original post. favorite_count: Number of likes. retweet_count: Number of retweets. reply_count: Number of replies. view_count: Number of views. created_at: Timestamp of the tweet. tweet_id: Unique identifier for the tweet. emotion: Predicted emotion label (neutral, fear, anger, joy, disgust, sadness, surprise). Emotion Scores: neutral, fear, anger, joy, disgust, sadness, surprise: Numerical probabilities indicating the strength of each emotion in the tweet. Personality Traits scores: neutral, fear, anger, joy, disgust, sadness, surprise: Annotation Method: The emotion and personality labels were assigned using a machine learning model trained on psychological and linguistic features. Each tweet is assigned a probability score for each personality trait and emotional category (see the report for a detailed description of the annotation process). Dataset 2: Musk Tweets (Political Annotation) [Musk Tweets greater than 49 char (Political Annotation).csv]This dataset contains 18,262 tweets from Elon Musk, spanning from June 4, 2010, to January 24, 2025. Each tweet has been annotated with political categories using ChatGPT-4. The dataset is a subsample of Dataset 1 and contains all tweets with more than 49 characters to ensure substantive political content. Data Fields: text: The content of the tweet. target: The recipient or mentioned user in the tweet (if applicable). characters: The character length of the tweet. type: Whether the tweet is a reply, retweet, or original post. favorite_count: Number of likes. retweet_count: Number of retweets. reply_count: Number of replies. view_count: Number of views. created_at: Timestamp of the tweet. tweet_id: Unique identifier for the tweet. category_labelling: Political classification assigned by ChatGPT-4. Political Categories: Tweets have been labeled into various political categories such as: Right-Wing (RW): Criticism of government overreach, opposition to political correctness, etc. Left-Wing (LW): Advocacy for progressive policies, climate change discussions, etc. Centrism or Neutrality Not Able to Determine: Cases where no clear political stance is evident. Annotation Method: ChatGPT-4 was used to classify each tweet into a political category based on contextual analysis. Categories were derived from common political discourse topics in the media (see the report for a detailed description of the annotation process). Keywords: Elon Musk, Twitter/X, political ideology, sentiment analysis, personality profiling, algorithmic amplification, computational text analysis, digital influence

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Keywords

Digital Humanities, X, Digital Influence, Twitter, Computational Social Science, Sentiment Analysis, Social Media, Personality Profiling, Computational Text Analysis, Text Profiling, Media Studies

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selected citations
These citations are derived from selected sources.
This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Citations provided by BIP!
popularity
This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Popularity provided by BIP!
influence
This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Influence provided by BIP!
impulse
This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Impulse provided by BIP!
0
Average
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