The Acquisition of Twitter: The Blue Album
For the purpose of context: on March 21st, 2006, Jack Dorsey created a website by the name of Twitter, a social media platform designed for microblogging and social networking. Here we are- 16 years later, Twitter is one of the most popular platforms in 2022 and now amasses roughly 206 million active users daily. On October 28th, 18 days ago, Twitter was placed into the care of Tesla CEO Elon Musk for the small price of 44 billion United States Dollars.
A man steps into the workplace of Twitter, a presumably organized company filled with teams, workers, assistants, engineers, programmers, influencers, interns, and anyone else you could guess was at a modern-day Social media company office. Elon's first mission was to pull the rug out from underneath the Jenga game that is Twitter, by firing the company's top executives. Thus begins the chronological detailing of the chaos which unfolded over the following weeks.
First on the chopping block were the executives, and naturally, on November 3rd, roughly 3,700 employees joined their fate by being instantaneously fired for little to no reason. People were outraged and took to the site by which they were previously employed to shine a spotlight on the injustice they faced. It was as if Twitter had shed its wings and dawned scales to resemble an ouroboros, a mythical snake depicted devouring its own tail and consuming itself seemed like a fitting metaphor to describe the havoc wreaked on the social media site.
Among the metaphorical bloodshed which circulated around the online-blogging platform, the online scavengers began to descend, looking for leftover scraps. Niche-internet celebrities who within their circles were hailed as comedians. After he acquired Twitter, to raise funds for the website, Musk decided to add a new feature to the subscription-based service on the site known as "Twitter Blue". Originally it was used to allow a user to upload higher-quality images and longer lengths of videos, but instead, the new feature was to adopt a pre-existing feature: the verification system. Any notable user of Twitter could apply for something called "verification" and the requirements to achieve this would be to just be a celebrity or a public figure (reporter, government official). With the 8-dollar purchase of Twitter Blue, any random individual could achieve verified status, and the ability to change their username to personify a genuine celebrity or company.
Twitter impersonators adopted new personas, some of whom they were attempting to impersonate being huge conglomerates such as pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and American defense company, Lockheed Martin. On November 10th, Twitter user @EliLillyCo tweeted, “We are excited to announce insulin is free now.” as a result, their stock tumbled down 4.5 points the following day. As hilarious as it seems from an outsider's perspective, there is a grave reality that the fate of many can lie in the hands of an anonymous stranger. To combat this, Musk announced that any person using this feature maliciously will be stripped of their 8-dollar verification badge, but I still think it's funny anyways.
As this is currently being written at 10:30 pm, November 17th, there is an uncertain feeling in the air about the fate of the company. Rumors are circulating that at midnight tonight, Twitter as it's currently known will be shut down. Personally, I am not very bothered either way, I have used the app frequently and it's been the inspiration for many laughs, and entertainment for many boring travels, but in a historical sense if this truly is the end then it is bittersweet for my, and many peoples memory of the internet as a whole. As much as these claims may be true, they may as well also be false since the source currently cited for these updates is an "inside source". Either way results in a fascinating sociological case study into 2022, and the internet.
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