Twitter has an outsize follower-ship among media importantes, tech gurus, and similar driving the national conversation. It swings a far larger bat than its simple “user” statistics might indicate.

Perhaps, but that's not really relevant to the professor's point. He was arguing that being exposed to these algorithmic processes ended up "rewiring" the people using the platform (my term, not his). But that's something that happens to the actual user. His point wasn't that Twitter was changing the national conversation - it was that being exposed to the algorithm changes the people who are experiencing that.

That's not a Musk thing. Facebook originated the algorithmic feed, and affects many times more people than Musk. And all those Twitter users were being redirected and reprogrammed by getting their life experiences by the alien and predatory algorithmic feed long before Musk bought the thing. Musk may have made changes to what specific stuff gets elevated in the Twitter algorithm, but the algorithm itself long predates him.