Everything Elon Musk Broke in the Year He’s Owned Twitter
Reading Time: 6 minutesIt’s sunk in., Elon Musk bought Twitter one year ago. Here’s everything he broke there.
He didn’t want to, but Elon Musk closed his purchase of Twitter one year ago. The world’s wealthiest person originally struck the deal in the spring of 2022, realized within a few weeks that he had committed a grievous mistake, and then spent the summer and early fall trying to weasel out of the $44 billion acquisition. The lawyers representing Twitter’s outgoing board of directors were better than Musk’s—or, maybe more accurately, had a close-to-ironclad case against a reputably brilliant billionaire who tried to call ‘backsies!’ on a contract he’d inked. Musk had to pay up, Twitter’s shareholders got $54.20 in cash per share, and the site has been subject to Musk’s whims ever since.
It has gone badly. Twitter, which is no longer called Twitter, is a sad shell of its former self by every conventional business metric available to the general public. Repelled by Musk’s behavior and changes to the site, advertisers have pulled back much of their spending. Users have fled. The company appears to be worth about a third of what Musk paid. It faces a crushing debt load, which requires Musk’s employees to twist into funny contortions as they describe the health of the business.
None of that is strictly anyone’s problem but Musk’s. What is our problem is everything else with X, the new name of a formerly useful social network. The user experience has cratered; Twitter’s pulse, formerly the heartbeat of the news, has ebbed. It is, generally, much harder to follow anything there, including news about X itself. So in commemoration of Musk’s first anniversary in charge of whatever the place has become, it’s listmaking time. Here are 11 ways Musk has made Twitter worse—for users, for advertisers, for the broader web, and conceivably even for democracy too. And here are three ways he’s actually improved the place. It’s not all bad!
The name. Twitter was a good name, even if the site didn’t connote positive things for many people. It inspired a distinct verb and gave the platform an identity. The brooding X means nothing to anyone except Musk, who envisions an ‘everything app’ that handles payments, hooks users with viral videos, and has numerous other features that nobody has especially wanted Twitter to have. The elimination of tweets in favor of posts has robbed the company of not just a widely recognized cultural shorthand, but its charm too.
The content moderation has worsened, as happens when someone lays off huge chunks of his content moderation staff in multiple waves. Twitter was never anyone’s idea of a bastion of healthy and safe online discussion, but before Musk took over, the most vile hate speech, especially when it had violent undertones, was often addressed in some way when it was reported. Numerous groups of researchers have found that hate speech, harassment, and bad information have flourished under Musk’s leadership. Those reports are nice to have, I suppose, but also won’t convince people who choose not to open their eyes.
The bots are absolutely inescapable. Quantifying bot and spam accounts on Twitter was always an inexact science, which Musk seized on when he tried to concoct a way out of his deal. Musk has told lots of untruths about bots on the platform, using the specter of those accounts not just in his deal-killing effort but in justifying the existence of his $8-a-month subscription product. So did he kill the bots? No! Bot accounts—including ones with blue check marks—are exceptionally easy to find. And pornbots, a specific subgenre, have broken containment and found their way into the replies of exponentially more posts than they once did. I will never pay for a night with Rosie, the self-described teenage escort in orange lingerie who asks me several times a day if I ‘want some.’ But I would like to have a beer with her one day and ask about her life on the front lines against Musk’s anti-bot offensive.
The most annoying people have gotten more annoying. To an extent, that is the result of certain deeply annoying users paying to have their posts algorithmically boosted, something that by no means applies to all of the worst accounts on the site but has resulted in the amplification of many. Moreover, Musk’s unbanning of previously banned bad posters has resulted in some truly vile flotsam returning to the platform. Mostly I am talking about racists and miscreants, but this trend isn’t limited to Musk’s ideological allies. Nobody benefited from the return of the #resistence-era nano-celebrities the Krassensteins, for instance.
The advertising experience is in shambles, something that looks directly related to the flight of the high-dollar and relatively prestigious brands that have pulled away. Think about the difference between the ads you’re likely to encounter on Instagram and the ones you might see on Twitter. On Instagram, you will probably find things that seem well tailored to your interests and that you might consider buying. On Twitter, you may literally see an ad in a different language—as I have on multiple occasions in the past year—or an ad for a crypto product whose account has double-digit followers and that gives off the unmistakable energy of a Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit waiting to happen. The labeling of advertisements has also become harder to spot and occasionally has disappeared altogether, creating the impression that a paid post found its way into your feed on merit.
News consumption has become even more calamitous than it ordinarily is on social media. Musk’s removal of the blue verification badge as anything other than a symbol of paying $8 has stripped away the only marker of authenticity or authoritativeness, however flimsy, that the platform had for individual accounts. The removal of headlines from links creates immediate fabrication opportunities. The new system got a test when Hamas and Israel went to war this month, and it failed. Aggregator accounts, with blue checks and hundreds of thousands of followers, produce no real news and do no real reporting but have managed to drown out reporters who don’t play the game Musk’s way.
Quote-tweets, historically a great way to watch a deserving poster be lampooned or at least elaborated on, have become difficult to find. X’s web app has done away with showing who retweets and quotes posts, denying people a useful way to get more context on whatever post they might be looking at. Just want to get a peek at how the public is reacting to a given sentiment? It used to be easy, but now it’s hard. The internet could definitely do with fewer pile-ons, and neutering the quote-tweet might have that effect. But it also makes it easier for rotten posts to go unchallenged, in particular now that the replies to popular posts are monopolized by people who pay for their replies to show up. Relatedly …
The Ratio has all but died. Ah, well.
The incentives are all messed up. Musk now offers a vaguely defined revenue-sharing plan for larger accounts, allowing them to collect some money for the advertising impressions that appear around their posts. That creates a direct incentive for accounts to post outrageous and even wrong things in order to juice impression counts and make more money. It’s also not at all clear how the payouts work. I signed up to see what it is all about, and at the end of last month I received $20 from X for my posts. I was delighted to make my subscription cash-flow positive for myself but have learned nothing at all about how the payouts are calculated. If I pivot to lying for clout, could I make dozens of dollars a month?
Paying attention to Elon Musk is now essentially mandatory, even if a user blocks his account. People talk about Musk on X all of the goddamned time, and it has become nigh impossible to spend significant time on the platform and not have an at least vague awareness of his opinions and activities. Musk will never recoup his investment as a financial matter, but by being Twitter’s forever main character, he will probably recoup it on emotional terms. $44 billion is a low valuation to get people to always look at you.
Being made to kind of root for Mark Zuckerberg has been a sad consequence of Musk’s ownership too. Threads, Meta’s Twitter clone, had a splashy debut and promised to be sort of like Twitter, except with a more predictable and less odious (or at least differently odious) leadership structure. Threads appears to have struggled badly since its big opening few days, but it doesn’t feel good to look at one of Zuckerberg’s products and think to yourself, Well, I sort of hope this thing works. Musk also made Zuckerberg into a sympathetic figure by running away from a fight in which Zuckerberg (who actually trains in martial arts and is a generally fitter-looking man than Musk) would have decimated him.
Musk’s reforms have not been all bad, however. Some positives:
The For You feed, X’s algorithmic fire hose that shows you posts it thinks you’ll like instead of posts you’ve explicitly asked to see, is actually pretty good. And it has improved significantly over the past half a year or so. I see mostly posts I enjoy from people who seem cool or whose accounts I look at often. It helps me avoid missing posts I might actually like. For sports news, it works great. Granted, for actual news, seeing tweets that mostly confirm my prior ideological preferences may be a bad thing.
The edit button, which debuted under Twitter’s old leadership and has become a central part of the subscription product under Musk, has been perfectly fine. Musk has created numerous other vectors for chaos and misinformation, but the edit button turns out not to have been one. All hail the edit button. It’ll cost you only $8 a month to avail yourself of this striking piece of technology.
The menswear guy, one of a number of extremely niche accounts to get an inexplicable boost in the For You feed under Musk, really has been a breath of fresh air.
Ref: slate
MediaDownloader.net -> Free Online Video Downloader, Download Any Video From YouTube, VK, Vimeo, Twitter, Twitch, Tumblr, Tiktok, Telegram, TED, Streamable, Soundcloud, Snapchat, Share, Rumble, Reddit, PuhuTV, Pinterest, Periscope, Ok.ru, MxTakatak, Mixcloud, Mashable, LinkedIn, Likee, Kwai, Izlesene, Instagram, Imgur, IMDB, Ifunny, Gaana, Flickr, Febspot, Facebook, ESPN, Douyin, Dailymotion, Buzzfeed, BluTV, Blogger, Bitchute, Bilibili, Bandcamp, Akıllı, 9GAG