Twitteris in its death throes once again. This weekend saw new technical limits imposed on non-premium users regarding how many tweets they could view in a day. Elon Musk claims this is to tackle “extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation” with non-verified accounts now limited to reading just 1,000 tweets per day. Verified users however can scroll through 10,000 before being locked out. The reasons put forth by Musk are utter nonsense, and you don’t have to dig far to discover why.
According to anumber of reportsand insiders speaking out online, Musk has failed to stay up to date with his Google Cloud subscription, and thus the corporation has limited the access it has to its services. The end of a quarter came along, and the social media platform has been faring so terribly that it’s now paying the price for failing to foot the bills required to keep the lights on. Musk isn’t protecting us from hackers or data scraping, he’s covering up his own incompetence with yet another obnoxious lie. Forbes revealed yesterday that the company is facing asixth lawsuit over unpaid office rent, so he must really hate paying bills.
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Thousands are now signing up to alternatives in the space like Blue Sky or Hive Social with the fear that, at any moment, Twitter will cease to exist.I wrote about this exact phenomenon months ago, and how the
online world has been shifting to more socially progressive and far more forward-thinking applications like Instagram and TikTok, which, unlike Twitter, seem to recognise where trends are shifting.
As ashamed as I am to admit it, a large part of my social presence is still driven by Twitter. I joined it as a teenager, and over the years have made lifelong friends and professional links that wouldn’t have been possible without it. Shitposts and bigots aside, it has always been an open platform for societal discussion, political activism, and finding spaces that represent what you love and who you are. It’s natural to mourn a thing like this suddenly being taken away when it’s been a constant in your life for so many years.
But ever since Mr. Emerald Mine and his horde of Muskrats took over, the writing has been on the wall. We saw awkward new features introduced and the distant promises of paywalls as hate speech once considered forbidden was excused because it aligns with Musk’s own values. He is a rich, bigoted transphobe who would rather spend billions on a company he has no idea how to run instead of going to therapy and admitting his mistakes. That’s how we got here. Comedy is also legal now and cisgender is a slur. All very normal changes.
Shortcuts and lay-offs were made following the acquisition due to misplaced confidence and panicked cost-cutting, all while Musk tweeted out how great things were going and how nobody was capable of giving Twitter a new lease of life except him. He obviously failed to mention that the only reason he had to buy it was because he tried to pull out of deal negotiations without bothering to read the fine print in his own contract. We are all suffering the loss of this platform that many rely on for their social connections and livelihoods because one man with far too much money and far too big an ego decided he wanted to play Mark Zuckerberg for funsies. If we just laughed at his jokes maybe things would be different.
What was previously a platform worth celebrating has devolved into a cesspit that elevates the loudmouthed idiots who pay for the privilege to have their terrible takes thrown atop the pile. It encourages the spread of misinformation, disinformation, and whatever Musk wants us to be interacting with. As a consequence, advertisers are running scared and the fruitless attempt to turn a free social media platform into a paid premium place for discussion isn’t working and was never going to. But still we cling onto the sinking ship, seeking out alternatives while also hoping things somehow turn around. But like most things with a rich white guy at the helm, he’ll walk away from this unscathed and fall upward into further fortunes.
Part of me fears the continued collapse of a free internet which in better times felt like a landscape anyone could use as a foundation for their own growth and success. However, that dream is faltering in the face of capitalism as all the wrong people or wrong voices are continually helped to the top with us powerless to stop them. I’m confident that there will always be a virtual water cooler for individuals to gather in search of purpose in the online world, but the coming death of Twitter is a tragedy we’ll take a while to recover from.
It’s become a social norm, penetrating the zeitgeist in ways that a replacement might never live up to. Maybe it’s best not to, and we can move on to pastures new without a fool like Elon Musk ruining it for all of us. Check back in six months to see if anyone is actually using the Blue Sky accounts they’re setting up as Twitter slowly circles the drain.
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