Is this the end of Twitter?
Twitter, with the timeline capabilities of Facebook, the picture and video virality of Instagram, and the mother of viral TikToks which were tweets is now a paradise for complainers, people with ADHD (whether real or imagined for tweets), social awareness, out-of-touch politicians, Bible quotes and porn. Twitter is a smorgasbord of adults from all walks of life doing a very bad job of not interacting with each other, and I love it, for now.
But Twitter’s new CEO, Elon Musk, has really been doing his best to tank his very expensive echo chamber.
In order to burn his brand-new house down, Elon had to fire the firefighters….and then beg them to come back after realizing that some of his employees were actually important to the functionality and daily operations of the app. I am also sure eliminating their previous remote working experience and making them come into an office is going to really bode well for relations and company morale, let alone when it’s time to take the annual company survey about work-life balance. Twitter has subsequently suffered. Herr Elon himself even tweeted an apology about Twitter being slow in certain countries.
In that same tweet, he used coding language to explain the site’s failures. I do not know what any of it meant, but I do know that several people who do look like they knew what it meant, stated he did not really know what it meant, either.
Previously, Twitter’s revenue came from ads, but now with Elon allowing a no-holds-barred take to Twitter, unless you of course are criticizing him, many advertisers are having second thoughts about if this is where they want to spend their money, and who can blame them when companies are losing money from fake tweets. According to Forbes, many high-profile companies such as Chipotle, United Airlines, General Mills and Audi have all pulled their ads from Twitter. On Sunday, November 13, Michael Harriot even tweeted about Black Twitter, the coolest and perhaps most visited portion of Twitter.
Harriot tweeted for a #blacktwitterblackwednesday blackout, essentially starving Twitter’s ad department two days before the busiest shopping day of the year. I actually have no real clue as to why we are doing it, but I am on board. Many high-profile celebrities that are not even Black are making their announcements about leaving the app. Since Twitter has fired so many of its employees, it has also been a goldmine for hackers.
One Twitter user @divalaci reported that her account had been hacked and while she was locked out, the hacker scammed her followers out of thousands. There have been widespread reports of tweets not loading fully, or loading out of order, as well. The glitches are a direct indication of issues, and there is no denying that.
With the installation of Twitter Blue, for just $8 a month, anyone can get a checkmark, which was previously used to indicate if that person was well-known or a notable person of public interest. The checkmark essentially made imposter accounts much less believable, so I’m sure nothing could go wrong if everyone got access to one, right? That seems harmless enough, except of course if you are pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and Aerospace Engineering firm Lockheed Martin. Both companies lost billions in capital after unidentified individuals with $8 burning a hole in their wallets and destruction on their minds tweeted, “we are excited to announce, insulin is now free,” and that they would stop selling military arms to certain countries Middle Eastern countries, respectively.
Imagine $8 costing billions. Companies BP, Nintendo, Chiquita and American Doll have all been the “victims,” of impersonations. Let us not forget how so many celebrity accounts were suspended for sending out parody tweets of Musk, the same man who wanted to make comedy legal again, just a short while ago. Just days after implementing a checkmark for Twitter Blue, there are talks that they will pull the program.
It is not simply the glitches, the out-of-order tweets, information of the culture of the company and internal emails being leaked and subsequently tweeted by user@zoeschiffer, the managing editor for Platformer, or the videos which are loading slower, or anything of the like. It is also that Twitter culture has drastically changed, and it may not have the capacity to recover.
It is unsafe technically, metaphorically and financially even. With a despotic tyrant at its helm, Twitter will likely sink before it swims, which makes sense because a sink is exactly what Elon let in.
