The Twitter Problem

So... Twitter. Yes I know you're tired of hearing about it. But I do think it's important to talk about what's going on over there, because it affects way more people than just those of us watching the dumpster fire directly.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, I tip my rainbow baseball cap to you. You're less chronically online than I. Here's the situation: Elon Musk bought Twitter last year for $44 billion, way more than it was worth at the time. Like billions more than it was worth. The CliffsNotes version is that he was talking shit about the way Twitter was run, said he'd buyout the company, take it private, and turn it into the bastion of "free speech absolutism" he thought it should be. The head Twits called his bluff and he signed an agreement to it. After he let some of the air out of his head and realized how monumentally stupid this was, he was like, "Nah I was just joking! Funny stuff, right guys?" But as we all know, Elon is not funny, so Twitter took him to court. You can't exactly back out of a massive business acquisition both parties have already signed off on, so he eventually capitulated and, through a combination of sold Tesla shares, loans from a bunch of banks, and a couple billion from a Saudi prince, Elon bought Twitter for more money than most of us could make in a hundred lifetimes.

With all that background out of the way, let's look at the state of "Twitter 2.0" half a year later. Elon pretty quickly unbanned a lot of accounts that violated Twitter's Terms of Service, including Marjorie Taylor Greene and Donald Trump (who has opted to continue using his Mastodon-based Truth Social instead). The wave of unbans brought with it Musk's new content moderation policy, which is... ambiguous. Sure, Twitter still has content rules, but they're enforced infrequently. As an example, when Musk rolled out the new "verification" process (more on that later), there was a big problem with accounts impersonating public figures. Elon was quick to ban accounts impersonating him, including

those that included "parody" in the name, which were explicitly permitted. Accounts impersonating other people... not so much. Well, until it started to affect big corporations, like when a fake Eli Lilly account announced free insulin. Big corporations have big sticks to swing around, after all.

Note from Editor Kyle: Eli Lilly actually changed their official account from @LillyPad to @EliLillyandCo, which was previously the fake account the free insulin tweet came from. Yeah that's not confusing at all...

So other than impersonators, who else has been freed from the censorship shackles of the woke left? Well it's the same people that flock to other "free speech" social networks like Parler, Gettr, and the aforementioned Truth Social. Yeah... it's Nazis. Like full-on swastika tattoo, "Jews will not replace us!" Nazis. Of course, where Nazis go, other scum follows. Homophobes, transphobes, racists, fascists, conservatives. If it has hate in its heart, it has a megaphone in Twitter. Obviously many of these people were already on Twitter, but they were kept somewhat in check by Twitter's moderation. Not only do they have free reign of the site now, but they're getting boosted by Musk personally liking and commenting on their shit. Because he's the worst.

Of course, Musk's other big change was to Twitter's verification process. Back when Twitter was a liberal hellhole, prominent users and public figures could submit an ID to prove their account belonged to the right person. With this system, you could tell at a glance that @MrBeast was actually Jimmy "MrBeast" Donaldson just by looking for a blue check mark next to the name. Public figures were easy to distinguish from parody accounts and scammers. The only real criticism of the system was how slow the process was.

There were, however, plenty of stupid complaints. The biggest (loudest) ones came from Elon and his Muskrats. They saw the blue check mark as a status symbol that divided the site into the verified bourgeoisie and the unchecked plebeians. So Musk hatched a brilliant idea. He could kill two birds with one stone (three if you count Twitter itself). Remember how he overpaid for Twitter? And how he now owes a lot of people, including a literal Saudi prince a fuck ton of money? Well, now for just $8/month you can have your very own blue check mark! That $8 price tag is actually steal, given that it was originally going to be $20. You can thank Stephen King for that price drop. Yes, that Stephen King. In response to the original announcement, King tweeted, "$20 a month to keep my blue check? Fuck that, they should pay me. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron."

Elon showed his mastery of negotiation by responding, "We need to pay the bills somehow! Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. How about $8?" Obviously, the subscription's cost wasn't the problem, which King himself clarified.

In the end, the price decrease that Elon seemingly haggled with himself over didn't convince King to part with his money. But Elon is so insecure generous that he gave King a blue check for free so people thought he won the exchange as an olive branch. King now gets all the other features of Blue for free, such as a higher character limit (which the app can't even show properly on the timeline), the ability to upload larger videos (a feature everyone definitely wanted in a text-based app), and 50% less ads (because no premium subscription could possibly sustain itself without any ads).

The biggest feature, and biggest problem, with Blue is how it boosts tweets. Every action a Blue user takes is given priority ranking. Interaction from verified users is worth more than the unverified, their tweets are recommended more frequently, and their replies are boosted to the top. The majority of Blue subscribers are fans of Elon and share a lot of his views, which range from weird tech-bro takes to fascist shit. So if a "verified" user (who's only verified as having wasted $8) posts a COVID-19 conspiracy theory, it gets seen by more people. Other Blue users then engage with the tweet, further boosting it. Then even more people see it, including those that are more susceptible to misinformation. Finally, Elon replies with a "concerning" or a "!" and it gets sent to the top of everyone's feeds. Elon and his Bluesers (Blusers?) have succeeded in turning what was once a valuable hub for rapid reporting and community building into a circlejerk of conservatism and conspiracy. Which was, of course, always the goal.

That's ultimately the reason I decided to write this. A popular social media platform getting worse and dying isn't necessarily a cause for concern. It happens. But Twitter isn't just dying; it's taking us down with it. It's no coincidence that intolerance is on the rise online, in-person, and in legislation. Twitter isn't the cause of this, but it is a culprit.

Note from Editor Kyle... Again: While grabbing sources for this post, I ran into yet another consequence of Elon's genius: I hit my daily tweet limit. He claims that this is to combat malicious data scraping, despite every other social media company being able to handle requests like this. It certainly isn't Twitter crumbling under it's normal user capacity because Elon refused to pay for their servers. He'd never let that happen.