Introduction - the saviour
Elon Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion on the 25th of April 2022 before unsuccessfully withdrawing his proposed acquisition in early July due to ‘breach of terms’, compounding his case for worst pull-out game ever (sorry Kanye).
Upon taking the helm, he promised to promote free speech and to limit bot accounts on the platform. Within a year of taking over, Musk had fired around 80% of staff at the company, they dared to have a life outside of work and not sleep in the office. There are currently hundreds of ongoing cases regarding the unfair dismissal of said employees. Anyways, onto the bad changes the platform has seen.
Musk’s Minions
Some accounts show up on everyone’s ‘For You’ tab until you block them, pushing certain agendas that Musk has clearly endorsed onto the millions of Twitter users across the globe. The most reprehensible cases of these are described below:
Ian Miles Cheong
Ah the man who is constantly outraged on US issues and sharing protest ragebait despite living in Malaysia. This bitter little man plagues the landing screen of millions of Twitter users with far-right ‘citizen journalism’. With a background of gaming journalism and reddit janitoring, Ian is obviously qualified to deny climate change and fight with anyone who’s politically to the left of Trump. His inability to smile and near half-million tweet count gives him a top prize for the most terminally online person in the world.
Chaya Raichik (Libs of TikTok)
Chaya Raichik (known online as the woman behind Libs of TikTok) has become a prominent right-wing figure appearing on Fox’s Tucker Carlson Show in April of 2023. She rose to TikTok and then Twitter stardom purely by hating on queer people. She has a special interest in trans people, who dominate the current day culture war whilst making up a very small percentage of the population. Much like the next figure, she pleads the queer community to keep their ‘alphabet agenda’ away from the children, whilst writing books tailored for (you guessed it) children…
Matt Walsh
Our final warrior on the ‘woke agenda’ is Daily Wire political commentator Matt Walsh. Matt is a self described ‘theocratic fascist’ and an even more prominent anti-trans figure than Ms. Raichik. In June of 2022, he cemented himself a place on the Mount Rushmore of transphobia by releasing a feature-length film titled ‘What is a Woman?’ where he argued in bad faith with people that have far better understanding of the topic than him whilst declaring that a woman is an ‘adult human female‘ begging the question ‘What is a Female‘ and so on. The 2+ hour long film was promoted on Twitter and is currently sitting at 187 million views at the time of writing.
It could be a coincidence but I find it rather strange that some of these pushed accounts all have very similar followings, with @fighthaven, @libsoftiktok and @MattWalshBlog all clocking in with 2.3M followers.
It’s clear from the accounts above that there is a definite bias in the construction of the average ‘For You’ page for each Twitter user. Alongside these noted accounts, there has been an obvious uptick in popular users that post fights (@fighthaven for example) and even more extreme violence such as shootings. It is not uncommon to see homicide with no content warning on Twitter these days as some of these posts draw more engagement and so populate the landing screens of more users.
Rate limit exceeded
More recently, Elon dropped his biggest dookie to date with a reading rate limit depending on your verification status. Unverified users were limited to ‘reading’ (posts appearing on screen) merely 600 posts a day, making the app unusable after mere minutes. Paying users had the luxury of reading 6000 posts a day, must be nice.
Above is the initial post announcing this. The limits soon changed to 400/800/8000, how generous. He then doubled down on his action by telling people to see their families and touch grass, whilst being one of the most melanin-deficient people on the planet who doesn’t see at least half of his children and has fallen out with the most of his family…
These ‘rate limits‘ got removed after a day due to it killing the app with users looking to join Trump on TruthSocial or to wait for Jack Dorsey’s new ‘BlueSky’ app or Meta’s ‘Threads’ competitor based off of Instagram infrastructure. But what was Elon’s excuse for implementing this measure in the first place?
Data Scraping & System Manipulation
Reddit recently restructured API accessibility by pricing it up stupidly high so that third-party apps could not access Reddit’s data without paying exorbitant request fees. This led to sitewide protests and the privatising of communities until moderators were threatened with losing their imaginary jobs and superficial internet power.
Similarly, Twitter’s limits were put in place to limit the scraping of data by programs such powerful AI tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney. These tools constantly request data from websites causing server stress and limited bandwidth for human users. I personally favour open-source programs with free API usage but Elon in his infinite wisdom will find another fuck-up to restrict it.
Adding to the current shitstorm, there’s been reports that Twitter hasn’t been paying their bills on time. An Australian firm is set to sue him after alleged failure to pay over $1M in bills and rent. Twitter has lost around two thirds of its value since Musk’s takeover in a record-breaking race to the bottom.
Links
Instagram: mario.k.n
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