Over three years, Elon Musk’s divisive policies have transformed Twitter into X, which many argue functions as a large alt-right platform. To analyze this transformation, the article first introduces a framework to examine trust and safety (T&S) operations as institutions, assessing them across three dimensions: complexity, hierarchy, and ideology. It then presents a manually constructed timeline of over 800 events from 2022 to 2024, based on news reports, corporate policies, and Musk’s posts.

Applying this framework in a qualitative analysis of the timeline, the study identifies three strategies in Musk’s governance: despotic governance (e.g., boosting his own posts and far-right actors while suppressing critics), power concentration (e.g., dismantling T&S teams and centralizing control), and authoritarian legitimization (e.g., using pseudo-democratic tools like polls and false narratives such as the “Twitter Files” to frame his actions as legitimate). Overall, Musk’s actions relied on the de-complexification and re-hierarchization of content moderation, processes often shaped by far-right ideology.

The study argues that Musk’s approach can be defined as a form of illiberal content moderation, marked by the instrumentalization of speech governance structures and the ideal of freedom of speech to advance his goals while suppressing others’ voices. This challenges assumptions that platform governance is shaped solely by law- and market-driven bureaucratization and helps clarify the links between X’s creation and Musk’s rise as a major political actor. The article concludes that X’s regime may become a new model of speech governance, reflecting broader trends of unaccountable tech elites embracing neoreactionary ideas.

This paper presents the results of an ongoing research project assessing a deal between Ontario Premier Doug Ford and Elon Musk’s Starlink to provide wireless internet service to isolated communities in northern Ontario with Starlink satellites. We ask how the Ford-Starlink partnership is situated within Canadian histories of provincial autonomy and Indigenous campaigns for political recognition and infrastructural inclusion while exploring what the deal can tell us about the relationship between local governance and technologically mediated transnational capital. Using mixed methods and digital tools, including AntConc and Factiva, we review provincial and federal infrastructure policy alongside media coverage to show how the Ford government instrumentalizes ongoing campaigns to expand wireless internet access to historically excluded Indigenous communities. In the guise of an idealized private-public partnership, the Ford-Starlink partnership demonstrates that provincial authority is adjusting to a new political calculus that circumvents conventional models of national sovereignty through investment in non-terrestrial networks (NTNs).

This project is uniquely suited to AOIR’s 2025 theme. While far from ubiquitous, NTNs pose profound challenges. High investment costs and historical access to space programmes stand to constrain the development of NTNs, further concentrating capital and control in the Global North. Though an acute problem for the Global South, the Canadian context offers an insightful example of how these trajectories converge. We draw on Indigenous studies of infrastructure and inclusion, research on wireless media infrastructures, and ongoing debates about the evolution of neoliberalism to highlight how NTNs enclose claims to infrastructural autonomy and national sovereignty.

Residents of the Galápagos Islands, a remote Ecuadorian archipelago without a submarine fiber-optic link to the mainland, have long struggled with slow and intermittent satellite internet offered by local providers. This paper presents initial findings from a field study exploring island residents’ experiences of internet connectivity in light of Starlink’s recent launch in the country. As U.S. tech companies expand their control over essential digital infrastructure, debates about the erosion of national digital sovereignty in Latin America have intensified. This contribution extends those discussions by examining how internet infrastructure is imagined and engaged with in everyday contexts, activating power dynamics in contradictory ways. The study employed an ethnographic approach, combining observation and physical walks across San Cristóbal Island with both in-depth and informal interviews with residents. Preliminary findings show that Starlink seems to offer a faster and more reliable service compared to local providers. It is positively rated in nearly all cases, enabling new possibilities and a mainland-like internet experience. In contrast, the state internet provider, which previously served most island households, is consistently linked to intermittent internet. While Starlink is seen as marker of change and progress, the state provider is associated with inefficiency and stagnation and appears to be losing market share. This suggests that although Starlink seems to enhance users’ autonomy, it also cements existing dependencies on a larger scale by displacing local internet infrastructures from public imagination.

Our work analyzes public documents, social media publications, media reports and interviews on the operation of Starlink in the Amazon to investigate the role of contemporary digital infrastructures in advancing projects of capitalist occupation and exploitation of the Brazilian Amazon. We identify hegemonic discourses surrounding the role of digital technologies in the economic and social development of the region and look at how these discourses resonate with 19th and 20th centuries projects of occupation for the region via ‘civilization’ and technological progress. We argue that this technophilic view does little to support sustainable and fair development: by remaining silent about the connections between digital infrastructures and the exploitation of local bodies and territories, it obstructs visions of the future that consider interdependent ways of life that escape the hegemonic imaginary of capitalist domination. At the same time, we discuss some of the ambivalent ways in which Starlink has been used and re-purposed by local communities.