Hello and welcome to TechScape. I'm Blake Montgomery, technology news editor at the Guardian US. Today's newsletter: X's final form, insights from a week of earnings and niche online Halloween costumes. Thank you for joining me.

With the US election, the transformation of X into Elon Musk's weapon reaches its climax. He has managed to bend his social network to his will.

Last week, Musk instructed his followers to report any “potential cases of voter fraud and irregularities” by tweeting about and linking to a forum within X called the “Election Integrity Community.” Experts told my colleague Johana Bhuiyan that the community, which has more than 50,000 members, was similar to the 2020 Facebook group “Stop the Steal,” with its conspiratorial tone and swamp of uncorrected misinformation.

Users posting on the standalone feed quickly began pointing out what they said was evidence of fraud and election interference.

Tweets showing everything from torn ballots to an ABC News system test to a postal worker doing his job and dropping off mail-in ballots were all presented as evidence that the presidential election was in jeopardy. The tweets include attempts to dox and identify people who users falsely accuse of stuffing ballot boxes or preventing Trump supporters from voting. Before anyone can determine whether the claims are true or false, users pick up on the posts and assume that the often-unwitting person being shown is guilty.

Musk weaponizes X's features. He adapts the contributions of others to his political will and curates the discussion into an alternative reality. He favors the posts of some while hiding those of others: The Washington Post reported last week that of the 100 congressional accounts that tweeted the most, only Republicans went viral. When he first purchased Twitter, Musk used Twitter's internal documents to redesign its public image using the Twitter files. Then, when he supported Donald Trump, he made his own narrative his spear. He bombarded his followers with pro-Trump messages and a flawed Trump interview on Twitter Spaces.

We have never seen a transformation like X's: a billionaire unafraid of campaigning and open partisanship, bending a network of connections used by tens of millions of people to his vision of reality. Elon Musk was the surprise in October.

Since his forced purchase failed to deliver financial success, Musk has turned to politics to make his $44 billion bet pay off. As my colleague Dan Milmo put it: “The enduring influence of itself in financial benchmarks.” Think of the restoration of Trump's account and all of Musk's pro-Trump tweets as in-kind donations that will help Musk make money during a Trump presidency.

When the election ends – will it ever end? – The value of X decreases. It will matter less that the world's richest man whines about voter fraud conspiracies. Traffic from We will see the effects of Musk's use of weapons in plain daylight.

Insights from earnings

Five of the Magnificent Seven – Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Apple – announced their quarterly results last week. All beat Wall Street's sales expectations, although not all stocks rose. We can learn some lessons from their outstanding achievements.

1. Advertising is still the lifeblood of the Internet economy
Google earnings, meta earnings, and even Amazon earnings show that digital ads can still sustain an empire.

2. Investing in AI is worthwhile, especially for the cloud business
Bully for Google, Microsoft and Amazon! All three, as well as Meta, have increased their capital spending by tens of billions to pay for their artificial intelligence products, but investors seem to think it's worth it. Both reported strong growth in their cloud business. Meta's investment in open-source AI has also led to the company claiming the title of “Most Used AI” as it adds Meta AI to Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram. Investors liked that.

3. Both results particularly benefit a company
Reddit, which posted a profit for the first time as a publicly traded company last week, reported a whopping 68% increase in revenue compared to the same quarter last year. The company makes most of its money from advertising. So a robust market means that Reddit, even as a smaller player, makes more money than Google and Meta. Reddit's advertising revenue increased 56%.

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman also attributed the company's better-than-expected performance to a newer source of revenue: deals with AI companies. Anyone who wants to build a large language model that generates English text uses Reddit to train this AI. This social network is a huge and well-organized corpus of text written by people. Reddit licenses this dataset to Google, OpenAI and others for tens of millions of dollars. This source of money may not last forever, but it won't disappear anytime soon either.

Reddit, in turn, benefits from AI. In this quarter alone, the number of monthly users of the social network increased by half to a whopping 97 million. Huffman attributed the dramatic rise to the social network's new translation feature, which uses AI to transcribe English posts into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and German. The company plans to expand the feature in the coming months.

New York Magazine's John Herrman points out that Reddit, as a repository for human-written material, also benefits from people who want to be sure that what they read wasn't written by AI. Reddit has become “Google’s favorite website,” writes Herrman, a throne that brings its own Sword of Damocles with it. Huffman said Reddit has become the sixth most searched word on Google. Many digital media companies have reached the same heights only to crash back down to earth.

This week on my iPhone

Niche Halloween costumes were given the meme treatment with the spread of jokes that started with “I hate gay Halloween…” on X and Instagram. The meme seems to point to something larger: online culture has reached a point where there is debate not just about the appeal of a single specific reference—NeNe Leakes and a white refrigerator, for example—but also about the worthiness, the insider -Turning Internet jokes into reality. Is it worth carrying a bulky cardboard box all night while screaming, “This is from an early season of The Real Housewives!”? There's a bit of self-loathing when you start your own tweet about your costume with “I hate.” I expect we'll see more witches and cats next year.

But maybe not. A rebuttal from X in the name of joy: “I love the niche costumes for everyone!!” I love the specificity. I love creativity. I love it when you put a lot of time and effort into something that is literally just there to make yourself laugh, and I really love it when I don't understand it and have to have it explained to me.”

For my part, I dressed up as a skeleton for the third year in a row.

The broader techscape