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Let’s not pretend Elon Musk suddenly made Twitter awful

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Musk is not everyone’s cup of tea. As such he has much of the progressive Twitterverse in a mild panic about what is to become of it, and by extension, what is to become of them.

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It’s early days. But the bazillionaire breeding machine (he breeds children – 10 at last count – like he breeds scandals) has already given cause for concern. In the days after he took over, there was a spike in hate speech. Use of the two most awful N-words – Nazi and the other one – went through the roof. Then Musk shared a mad conspiracy theory about the violent attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband.

By coincidence of timing, the Musk takeover and the Pelosi story have combined to show Twitter at its worst. A cesspit. A dumpster fire. A troll factory. A conspiracy machine. A cure for and a cause of whatever it is that ails you, sometimes at the same time. And now it is the plaything of the world’s richest man.

So should we stay or should we go?

The answer might seem obvious, but anyone who knows Twitter knows the perils of making public declarations of quitting it in high dudgeon. It’s been a running joke for years that some people kill off their Twitter profiles as often as Twitter users liked to kill off Fidel Castro: every other week, but they’d always pop up alive again. Castro eventually obliged by actually dying for good, but will Twitter quitters do the same?

Time will tell. According to Twitter research leaked to Reuters before the Musk takeover, the platform has been haemorrhaging users. “Where did all the Tweeters go?” the internal document wondered.

Musk himself mused back in May: “Is Twitter dying?”

If it is, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Musk himself is going to hasten its demise. The news this week that he is going to charge verified Twitter users $20 a month to keep their once-cherished “blue tick” – basically, a sign that Twitter has confirmed you are the very important person you say you are – was a flashing red light on where the platform might be headed.

If authenticity is literally up for sale, surely it is worth next to nothing.

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But on the other hand – and with Twitter, there is always another hand – where are we going to go if we leave? Beats me. There are no obvious alternatives: TikTok is all video, Instagram is too busy copying TikTok to draw the Twitter crowd, and the jury is out on the start-ups (which include the brand new Bluesky Social, being tested by Twitter’s founder Jack Dorsey).

So for now I’m taking the time-honoured route of only thinking about quitting Twitter a dozen times a day and then never going through with it.

I like to think of it as taking a stand on principle, in the Groucho Marx sense. If you don’t like this principle, follow me on Twitter, because I do have others.

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