Elon Musk is bragging about record usage on X during the Israel-Iran escalation. He wants you to believe this is a victory for "citizen journalism." He wants advertisers to believe the platform is a thriving town square.
He is wrong.
High usage during a geopolitical crisis isn't a sign of a healthy platform. It is a sign of a high-functioning dopamine loop fueled by chaos, misinformation, and "doom-scrolling." In the attention economy, we have mistaken friction for value. We have mistaken the heat of a dumpster fire for the warmth of a hearth.
If you run a business, or if you simply value your sanity, you need to understand that "record usage" is often the lead indicator of a platform’s terminal decline.
The Blood-Sugar Spike of Social Media
When missiles fly, people refresh their feeds. This is a primal instinct. We are wired to seek information during threats. On X, this manifests as a massive spike in "seconds spent on platform."
But let’s look at the quality of those seconds.
During the recent tensions, the "For You" algorithm did not provide a curated stream of expert analysis. Instead, it served a chaotic slurry of:
- Outdated footage from video games (Arma 3) passed off as live combat.
- Blue-check "engagement farmers" posting inflammatory, unverified claims to trigger payouts.
- Bot networks amplifying polarization to drown out ground-level reporting.
Musk celebrates this as "unfiltered truth." In reality, it is signal-to-noise ratio collapse.
In information theory, $S/N$ is the measure of useful information to irrelevant data. When $N$ (noise) increases exponentially—which happens during "record usage" events—the value of the platform effectively hits zero. You aren't "informed." You are over-stimulated and under-educated.
The Incentive Architecture is Broken
I’ve spent fifteen years watching social graphs evolve. I’ve seen platforms pivot from chronological feeds to algorithmic "interest" engines. Usually, the goal is to keep you there longer.
The current iteration of X has achieved the ultimate goal of the attention merchant: monetized outrage.
By tying creator payouts directly to impressions, X has created a perverse incentive structure. If I post a nuanced, verified update about a complex military maneuver, I might get 10,000 views. If I post a fake, terrifying clip of an explosion with a caption like "THE END IS HERE," I get 2 million views.
The algorithm doesn't care about the Geneva Convention. It cares about the "dwell time" on the ad placed three scrolls down.
When usage hits a "record high" during a war, you aren't seeing a surge in "truth seekers." You are seeing a surge in people being exploited by an incentive loop that rewards the most extreme version of every story. This isn't a town square; it’s a gladiator pit where the spectators are also the lions.
The Advertiser’s Dilemma: Reach vs. Retch
Marketers often ask me, "If the usage is at an all-time high, why aren't the big brands coming back?"
The answer is simple: Context matters more than eyeballs.
Imagine you are a CMO for a major airline or a luxury watch brand. Do you want your sleek, high-end creative appearing directly underneath a grainy, unverified video of a drone strike, sandwiched between two accounts arguing about ethnic cleansing?
"Record usage" driven by tragedy is toxic for brand safety. It is a low-intent, high-stress environment. Users are not in a "discovery" or "purchase" mindset. They are in a "survival" or "anger" mindset.
- Reach is the number of people who saw your ad.
- Resonance is whether they liked you for it.
On X, you might get the reach, but the resonance is increasingly negative. High usage in this context is actually a deterrent for the very revenue Musk needs to keep the lights on.
The Myth of the Citizen Journalist
The "lazy consensus" among Musk's fans is that X has replaced "Mainstream Media" (MSM) because it’s faster.
Speed is not a proxy for accuracy.
In a crisis, the first report is almost always wrong. In the old world, editors acted as filters. Yes, they were slow. Yes, they had biases. But they had a process for verification.
On X, the "process" is now replaced by the Community Note. While Community Notes are a fascinating experiment in crowdsourced truth, they are inherently reactive. A lie can travel around the world three times before a Community Note even gets enough votes to appear.
By the time the note says "This video is actually from a 2014 explosion in Yemen," the 50 million people who saw it have already integrated it into their worldview. The "record usage" is built on the back of these 50 million false impressions.
Stop Asking if Usage is Up. Ask if the Cost is Worth It.
People often ask: "Isn't any growth good growth?"
No. Growth that comes from trauma-bonding your user base to their screens is unsustainable. It leads to user burnout. It leads to "platform fatigue."
If you are using X to follow global conflicts, you are likely suffering from a distorted perception of reality. You are seeing the 1% of the world that is on fire, amplified 100x by an algorithm designed to keep your heart rate elevated.
The Hard Truth for Investors and Users
If you want to understand the health of a digital ecosystem, stop looking at "Total Seconds Spent." Look at Churn per High-Value User.
The people who provide the most value to a platform—the experts, the actual journalists, the researchers—are the ones most likely to leave when the noise becomes deafening. What’s left behind is a "Dead Sea Effect." As the "fresh water" (experts) leaves, the platform becomes increasingly salty (toxic) until nothing of value can live there.
X is currently undergoing the most aggressive salt-concentration event in the history of the internet.
What You Should Do Instead
- Diversify your intake. If X is your primary news source during a crisis, you are being manipulated by an algorithm that prioritizes engagement over your mental health.
- Verify the "Blue Check." Remember that it no longer denotes authority; it denotes a $8/month subscription. Treat every "verified" account as a potential bad actor until proven otherwise.
- Watch the advertisers. Don't listen to what Musk says; watch where the money goes. If the "record usage" doesn't translate into a return of blue-chip advertisers, the platform is a ghost ship with a very loud sound system.
The "record high" usage isn't a sign that X is winning. It’s a sign that the world is hurting, and X is the place where that pain is being packaged and sold back to us in 280-character bursts.
Stop celebrating the fire just because you can see it from space.
