The Already-Entertaining Elon Musk Era on Twitter
Months ago, I wrote an article about Tesla CEO Elon Musk acquiring Twitter. In it, I expressed cautious optimism on his vision to change Twitter to something that resembles more of a "digital town square". What I did not anticipate was the hoopla around the percentage of users being bots and Musk threatening to walk away from the deal. With the situation being so volatile (and it still is currently), I held off until (1) Musk either officially acquires Twitter or walks away and (2) Twitter experiences any notable changes if the former happens. Well, the first scenario happened and we're just over a month since Musk literally brought a kitchen sink into Twitter HQ.
Let's just say there was no shortage of entertainment and chaos. Rather predictably, the mainstream media and their "journalists" bust out their apocalyptic, faint-on-the-couch takes. Washington Post "journalist" Taylor Lorenz described the acquisition as if "the gates of hell opened"; Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic wrote that there was "an apocalyptic feel to the ordeal; and The Independent published an editorial already pronouncing Twitter dead after Musk fired a substantial portion of employees.
As I have repeatedly pointed out in my posting history, the mainstream media is full of garbage like the downfall of The Washington Post or their horribly aged pro-Amber Heard takes in the wake of the Heard v. Depp defamation case. Emily Oster of the aforementioned The Atlantic published an editorial, calling for a COVID amnesty after she advocated for shaming and fear tactics to push vaccination (which at this point, is a fool's errand considering how mild Omicron was and the fact the virus mutates quicker than the cold or flu). So what has actually been going on at Musk's Twitter? Is the platform really dead or at its death throes?
In spite of cutting down the workforce, I have personally not noticed any performance changes as I put this post together. In fact, it does feel a tad snappier which Musk has claimed an improvement by about 400 ms. His team has also purged a lot of bot accounts. Despite Reuters claiming that Twitter has become "unsafe", there is no evidence that suggests that. To the contrary, human trafficker human advocate Eliza Bleu discovered that Twitter has stomped out a popular hashtag used to sell child sex abuse material, a problem that has long plagued the platform. The Portland, Oregon-based ANTIFA account got suspended for using Twitter to organize violence and crime.
The mainstream media and advertisers tried their best to make it look like the sky is falling. CBS News theatrically announced its leave from Twitter only to return a few days later and face immense ridicule. A month ago, Musk threatened to name and shame advertisers who suspended ads on Twitter to which Business Insider described it as a "dumb thing to do". Turned out it was not dumb as advertisers have already returned according to Musk.
As of right now, Musk is releasing the "Twitter files" via Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss which revealed pre-Elon Twitter's political bias and censorious nature. The Hunter Biden laptop scandal, which was initially falsely labelled as a Russian narrative, was suppressed, going as far as to remove links, label the scandal as "unsafe", and block transmission via DM's. Considering when the scandal was revealed and how politically biased Twitter's actions were, this censorship was effectively election interference which Musk confirmed. For those who have followed me for a while, this should not be surprising as last year, I already covered how pre-Elon Twitter suppressed certain opinions on the 2020 election as a state actor.
All in all, it has been an incredibly entertaining last month at the bird. To be clear, I do not see Musk as a savior. He's a flawed person who can and will make mistakes. For instance, while I find SpaceX and Starlink to be impressive, I also abhor the Apple-like business model from Tesla and the Hyperloop is a fool's errand. He knows how to make money and despite "concerns" that Twitter will lose substantial ad money, it's doing fine currently. However, doing better than old Twitter is such a low bar and once the honeymoon period is over, will the platform continue to improve? Will Musk actually deliver in open-sourcing Twitter's code or was that a Peter Molyneux-esque promise?
