What has Twitter done for you? I’ve long found this question embarrassing to answer. I’ve spent most of my adulthood loathing the site, and much of my career critiquing it – and yet I owe it for a lot of the best things in my life. Twitter is how I met my partner and some of my closest friends, and it’s why I get to write for a living, too. It’s where I’ve read the most interesting articles, expanded my politics, come across new ideas and (for better or for worse) gained a greater understanding of people’s different views. I’m not alone – even with Twitter’s pronounced and serious issues, it has remained a place to build connections and generate ideas.
Or it had, until Elon Musk took over in October last year. Almost immediately he began making significant changes – changing it from a platform people begrudgingly used in spite of its problems, into something else entirely. People’s timelines started showing content from accounts they didn’t follow; the app became extremely glitchy and there were regular outages. Musk suspended some of his most vocal critics and began implementing random suggestions his fans tweeted at him. Almost a million users reportedly quit within days.
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