Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter is full. After using into the corporate’s headquarters on a horrible “sink” pun earlier this week, the Tesla founder formally took the reins, closing the $44 billion deal and firing not less than 4 of the corporate’s prime brass within the course of.
Everybody knew this was coming, knew Musk deliberate to make modifications to how the location is (or isn’t) moderated. They’d been dreading the day since phrase of the deal began spreading in April. So, as is barely proper, folks went to the platform’s burial floor—i.e. the fowl app itself—to offer its eulogy.
Not lengthy after Musk sauntered into Twitter HQ with a sink, NBC Information author Ben Collins posted a immediate on the platform: “Okay all people it’s Zero Hour for this web site, submit your favourite tweets and provides them slightly kiss goodbye.” He hooked up a screenshot of a 2021 tweet that mentioned, “me and my associates would’ve killed E.T. with hammers I can let you know that a lot.”
One other thread referred to as for members of Black Twitter to share “belongings you’ve realized, folks you’ve met, memes, tweets, movies.”
Each threads revealed lengthy strings of Twitter’s best hits, the small moments which have, since 2006, made the location what it’s. And whereas many celebrated the Twitter That Was, others—those who weren’t suggesting different platforms—spoke of the way to make use of the location’s current performance to maintain the trolls at bay. As a result of for all the discuss of Twitter being a hellspace, folks stored going again time and again, dodging racists, misogynists, TERFs, homophobes, and Nazis within the hopes of discovering that one insightful tweet or one mind-blowing thread that will make all of it value it.
It’s these moments individuals are most afraid of shedding. As a result of at the same time as Musk talks of wanting Twitter to be a digital city sq., he’s additionally acquired some bushy concepts about content material moderation, ones that would dampen, or outright drive out, the voices important to the platform.
As Chris Stokel-Walker reported, bot watchers noticed an uptick in right-wing accounts in April after the Musk deal made headlines. Some indicated that those that had been deplatformed would possibly return to a Musk-moderated Twitter, one thing Christopher Bouzy of bot-detection system Bot Sentinel mentioned “could possibly be disastrous for girls and marginalized communities already dealing with abuse and focused harassment on the platform.”
Broadly, I are inclined to agree with my colleague Jason Parham {that a} mass exodus from Twitter doesn’t essentially need to be a nasty factor. If it occurs—one thing that will nonetheless be a couple of years off—it “would possibly give rise to the following iteration of the social web elsewhere.” Digital tradition stays in flux, because it has to, and there’s no want to remain on a platform that’s already a nightmare. Nonetheless, on this second, it’s exhausting to listen to the requiem being sung on Twitter and never need to sing alongside.
