Elon Musk’s Unrecognizable App
Elon Musk has owned Twitter for a year now. In that time, he has slashed the company’s value and rendered it unrecognizable to many users. Now the platform’s organizing principle is its owner’s whims.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
- Israel’s dangerous delusion
- People are worrying about the wrong downtowns.
- Donald Trump deserves a fair trial.
53 Dizzying Weeks
One year and a week ago, Elon Musk posted a video of himself walking into Twitter headquarters holding a sink. “Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in!” he wrote on the platform. A dizzying series of changes—to Twitter’s structure, value, staff, and name—have unfolded in the 53 weeks since. No one is quite sure what to call the platform now—X? Twitter? X, formerly Twitter? And it’s equally unclear what the platform is now, beyond a place for Musk to force-feed his fantasies and ambitions to the site’s dwindling number of users.
I used to go on Twitter, laugh at the reported that Musk had changed the algorithm to promote his own tweets to more users; also, paid users now get their replies boosted when they engage with a post (another expression of the free market at work, I suppose). Musk’s account has an outsize role in elevating content: with the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public looked at seven highly influential accounts accounts that cumulatively boasted 1.6 billion views posting about the Israel-Hamas war and found that “with the exception of one … all had received replies from Musk since his acquisition of Twitter.” Musk has users to accounts spreading misinformation (he posted and deleted a recommendation to follow two such accounts in the hours following Hamas’s attack on Israel), and he has used his perch to engage with all manner of odious content. In February, for example, he Scott Adams, the cartoonist who made racist statements.
