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Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter is full. After driving 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 adjustments 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 simply proper, individuals went to the platform’s burial floor—i.e. the chicken app itself—to offer its eulogy.
Not lengthy after Musk sauntered into Twitter HQ with a sink, NBC Information author Ben Collins posted a prompt on the platform: “Okay everyone it’s Zero Hour for this web site, publish your favourite tweets and provides them a bit of kiss goodbye.” He hooked up a screenshot of a 2021 tweet that stated, “me and my mates would’ve killed E.T. with hammers I can let you know that a lot.”
One other thread called for members of Black Twitter to share “belongings you’ve realized, individuals 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 various platforms—spoke of the way to make use of the location’s present performance to maintain the trolls at bay. As a result of for all the discuss of Twitter being a hellspace, individuals saved going again many times, 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 whilst 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 may return to a Musk-moderated Twitter, one thing Christopher Bouzy of bot-detection system Bot Sentinel stated “may very well be disastrous for ladies and marginalized communities already going through abuse and focused harassment on the platform.”
Broadly, I are likely to agree with my colleague Jason Parham {that a} mass exodus from Twitter doesn’t essentially must be a nasty factor. If it occurs—one thing which will nonetheless be just a few years off—it “may give rise to the following iteration of the social web someplace else.” 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 arduous to listen to the requiem being sung on Twitter and never need to sing alongside.
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