What has happened Twitter!?
Posted 8th August 2023
Twitter, for all its flaws, was my social media platform of choice. Over the years I’ve used it to get up to the minute news about local services, won freelance work, and met people who I count as firm friends; all solely through Twitter.
But late last year Elon Musk, the owner of electric car company Tesla, bought the platform and I decided to take a break. Since then he has made some often deeply concerning moves:
- Thoughtless introduction of features that would clearly never work
- Suspending many people’s accounts for linking to other social networks
- Banning the accounts of journalists who are critical of Musk
- Un-banning far-right accounts, including Donald Trump
- Introducing a toxic working culture
- Unceremoniously turning off third party apps
- Turning off access to bots
- Laid off the entire accessibility team
Incredibly, despite all of that there was the tiniest bit of nostalgia for Twitter that was keeping me from emotionally detaching completely, but last it rebranded itself ‘X’ and that’s me done.
You can find me over on Mastodon if that’s your jam: I’m @tempertemper@mastodon.social and would love to hear from you!