Twitter gets smoked

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Twitter under Musk is in distress

Since Elon Musk bought Twitter, the platform is losing its credibility for information and connectivity. Musk recently acquired Twitter for 44 billion dollars, taking over the company as the new CEO. In the five weeks since, it’s been overrun by misinformation, bot accounts, and the censorship of free speech.

Twitter is suffering massively from the recent changes that Musk implemented. Accounts have noticed that they’ve been censored for speaking out against Musk, in some cases even being banned. Company employees have also faced issues, with thousands of them either resigning or being fired, leaving Twitter with minimal staff and more problems.

Features are currently being added and revoked; workers across the company lost badge access in mid-November. The employees are sitting with uncertainty every day this goes on, wondering if they’ll lose their jobs or what changes they’ll have to implement on the site each day they go in.

Musk’s changes have caused issues for not only Twitter but a multitude of other companies as well. The launch of Twitter Blue brought a new wave of internet trolls to cause havoc. Blue introduced paid verification, allowing users to pay for a verification badge showing their accounts as trustworthy sources or notable accounts.

User’s abused this almost immediately, claiming the badge and changing their usernames to represent companies, beginning to post faux tweets. Irreparable damage was caused to the companies’ reputation and stock, as some users posted tweets that would cause an immediate public backlash against the companies they posed as.

Other social media sites have already started to compete with them. The Hive is a new and very similar social site to Twitter, keeping the same features like reposting. However, it has introduced new features as well, with image-only sections and song features on your profile. Hive is just one of the first serious competitors, already taking on a few thousand new users from Twitter.

The loss of Twitter as a platform could prove to be catastrophic to brands, news companies, and the public in general. They have functioned as one of the internet’s largest connectivity platforms with free speech for over a decade. However, the rise of bots, misinformation, and unbannings of those who have broken their Terms of Service in the past may just prove to be the end of it.

Whether the social media giant will survive is anyone’s guess. There’s been plenty of alarmists posting that it’ll go down any day, but it won’t. Twitter’s code will keep functioning for as long as it was designed to run without error. So unless it is forcibly brought offline, the social site will continue to function as it always has, with more misinformation and less free speech than ever before.