It’s been a year since Elon Musk bought Twitter, now known as X, promising to rejuvenate the “digital town square”. By all measures it has been an abysmal failure.
After paying an inflated $44bn, Musk admits the platform is now worth half that. Most advertisers have fled — in no small part because the self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” retrenched the human beings doing the moderation, creating a disinformation quagmire. Last month the EU launched an investigation into X over “the alleged spreading of terrorist and violent content and hate speech” relating to the Hamas-Israel war.
Musk is suing the groups who alerted the world to the surge in hate speech and disinformation — claiming these civil society organisations are trying to “kill” the platform and are responsible for the exodus of advertisers.
X — the rebranding is another eccentric whim of the freewheeling Musk — is a shadow of what it was in the good old Twitter days
X — the rebranding is another eccentric whim of the freewheeling Musk — is a shadow of what it was in the good old Twitter days. Trolls are rampant, especially those on the far right. Musk gives the nutters free rein, and retweets their conspiracy theories.
Twitter was once wonderful. There was serendipity and surprise to it. I met many friends through Twitter in the early days.
Now X marks the spot where Twitter went to die.
From declaring his dog to be the new CEO of Twitter to challenging Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to a cage fight, it’s been one weird, boring attempt after another by Musk to hog the spotlight.
Social media is all about posturing, as we know, but such nonsense has unfortunately become news. As my very first news editor told me: news is what people do, not what people say.
X has taken this terrible trend to its nadir. Every time Musk tweets some inanity, it gets reported on by the tech media.
When former CEO Parag Agrawal wrote a careful and thoughtful post about Twitter bots (which Musk was dishonestly using as an excuse to get out of his binding offer to buy Twitter), Musk replied with a poop emoji.
This juvenile reply has become the standard response to any e-mail sent to X’s now unstaffed media address. A poop emoji.
This is teen fart-joke humour from someone who has forgotten how to behave like a decent human being. The world has real problems and Musk shouldn’t be wasting his time with a social platform he has now eviscerated.
* Shapshak is editor-in-chief of Stuff.co.za and executive director of Scrolla.Africa
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