Well, well, well. It turns out that even the supposed genius Elon Musk can make a few mistakes, especially when it comes to Twitter. One of Musk’s peeps (who wished to remain anonymous) recently spilled the tea and revealed that despite initial excitement over Musk’s takeover, the product hasn’t really improved. Oopsie! Musk and the Twitter team have yet to comment on this revelation, probably too busy tweeting their latest hot takes.
It all started just over a year ago, when Musk, the world’s richest person at the time, bought over 9% of Twitter, making him its biggest individual shareholder. Not long after, he decided to stage a hostile takeover bid. Drama, much? In a post about his takeover bid, Musk complained that Twitter wasn’t cool enough and ignored free speech (whatever that means). He also pledged to rid the site of bots, announcing that Twitter was only interested in “authenticating all real humans.” Sigh, someone needs to take Elon’s Twitter password away.
Fast forward six months, and some of Musk’s promises have been kept, including bringing back accounts that were previously banned (including former President Donald Trump’s – oh joy) and getting rid of bots. Great work, Elon! However, some of these moves have led to unintended consequences, including outages, and some users have been experiencing strange glitches (such as seeing users they don’t follow on their timeline).
So what’s really going on at Twitter? According to some unnamed former employees, Musk has made a mess of many of the company’s core functions and the internal chaos is almost palpable. They describe Twitter as a “regrettable networking event where everyone’s got business cards but no one’s got a job.” OUCH. It seems that the magic of Twitter has vanished, and now it’s just a carnival act, with Musk as the ringmaster.
One of the main issues with Musk’s leadership is that he’s moved away from a chronological feed to a new “For You” feed, which relies on an algorithm to recommend content to users. Some say this move has inundated them with tweets from users they don’t want to follow, and even the old “Following” feed now contains recommendations for tweets from outside users. Plus, Twitter’s decision to amplify previously suspended accounts, including those deemed as “hate speech,” has only made things worse.
Another problem is Twitter’s recent decision to monetize the site, to the annoyance of many users. Twitter has announced it will now limit access to its application programming interface (API) and charge a fee for most cases, which could result in researchers and developers being unable to collect and analyze data. For example, Indiana University’s Observatory on Social Media is worried that they won’t be able to afford the exorbitant costs and will have to shut down their tools built for journalists and researchers. Uh oh.
Despite all this, Musk assures us that Twitter is trending towards breaking even financially, even after saddling the company with $1 billion in yearly interest payments from the purchase. He’s also squeezed users for more payments with multiple charges for various aspects of using the site. In fact, he’s even promoted his dog, Floki, to CEO, which seems more like a joke than anything else.
But the bigger issue is this – what else is next for Musk? Apparently, he’s planning on pursuing generative artificial intelligence, which could be interesting, but also makes us feel like he’s spread too thin. It seems like Musk is always diving headfirst into a new project without thinking about the consequences. And while Twitter hasn’t been perfect, it was still a unique platform – an alternative place where people could discuss and debate freely. Now, we might be stuck with Elon’s Twitterverse forever. Scary thought.
Serious News: washingtonpost
