By Sergio Lopez
A review and opinion of the changes on the Social Media app Twitter under the purchase of the multi-billionaire Elon Musk.
On October 27th, Elon Musk bought social media Twitter for $44 billion, taking leadership for the app. Since his purchase, Musk has fired several of the previous staff at Twitter and introduced his plan of a “free speech” Twitter, removing censorship and expanding upon the Twitter Blue subscription service, making it $8 and adding a verification mark to the subscription along the previous benefits of being able to post longer videos and edit tweets.
Musk stated in a tweet, “Twitter will do lots of dumb things in the coming months,” prompting to keep what works and what doesn’t.
The most noticeable change since Musk’s purchase of the company is that majority of people’s timelines are flooded with checkmarks, sparking parody to occur rapidly throughout the past week. From looking at a tweet, a Twitter Blue subscriber and a verified official account have the same checkmark, only when visiting a profile and clicking on the checkmark can one see if an account is verified for purchasing Twitter blue, or because they are credible. Knowing the internet, several people took to purchase the $8 subscription to mimic popular companies.
A parody account mimicking Eli Lily, a major insulin company, went viral this week for tweeting that “Insulin was now free,” with the account seeming like the official from a glance due to the Twitter blue verification mark. This small Twitter move cost the Insulin company millions of dollars, with confused stockholders pulling out, causing the Eli Lily shares to drop from $368 to $346 a share.
Since this, Musk has closed Twitter Blue to the public and announced yesterday that the subscription would be returning on the 29th to air out the issues, with a major fix being that upon buying a verification mark, a user can no longer change their username, hoping to fix the problem of parody.
Even aside from the parodies, Musk has pursued “free speech” on Twitter, but Musk isn’t demonstrating it. This Sunday morning, Musk took to Twitter to apologize for Twitter being slow across the country, blaming it on coding, where Eric Frohnhoefer, a longtime employee for Twitter on Android replied to his tweet saying that Musk was wrong, where Musk replied “He’s fired” publicly on his account.
From the perspective of someone who uses Twitter just for comedy, entertainment, and some politics, Twitter has stayed relatively the same, with the most noticeable change for most people being the increase in people verified, but from time to time a parody account pops up that seemingly appears real from a first glance, being enough to spark confusion in the lesser informed users.
While Twitter might be relatively the same right now, based on the recent changes under Musk, social media might be completely different by the end of the year.
Sergio Lopez
Sergio Lopez ('24), is a junior at Redwood High and a first-year journalism student for the Gigantea. He is passionate about anything entertainment based and hopes to pursue either Political or Computer science in the future.
Tags: Elon Musk, social media, twitter
