Elon Musk finally put his money where his errant mouth is and completed his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter. Well, what's a man to do with a $220 billion fortune? In his inimitable touchy-feely management style, he immediately fired most of the company's senior execs, and there is speculation that he intends to fire up to 75% of the current staff. Well, there will be no more of all that namby-pamby monitoring and moderation of posts, will there? Anything goes now, right?
While Musk buddies like Donald Trump, Kanye West and Marjorie Taylor-Green may be raising a half-hearted cheer (not to mention a whole host of unsavoury QAnon conspiracists, neo-Nazis and COVID deniers), an awful lot of people see this as the beginning of the end for the micro-blogging site. Musk's "free-speech absolutism", and his avowed desire for a "common digital town square" may turn out to be a toxic space where most people just don't want to be. That, at least, is my hope.
There is a contingent of hard-core users out there that see this as the time to sabotage Twitter, with the goal of bringing the Musk-owned vehicle down and making it irrelevant, rather like Tumblr after Yahoo acquired it in 2013. There is a split between those that just want to abandon the site completely, and those that want to stay and make it all but unusable, and to tank its value.
It's hard to know what such people might be able to do that a bunch of ultra-right wing racists and homophobes might not already be ramping up to as we speak. Musk has already sent a placatory open letter to jittery advertisers, vowing that Twitter will not become a "free-for-all hellscape" under his watch. But I have a suspicion that Elon Musk's idea of a "hellscape" may be miles away from other people's, and many advertisers are already jumping ship.
Well, Mr. Musk, I wish you the worst of luck, and look forward to reading about the resulting "hellscape". Although I won't be reading about it on Twitter.
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