The Social Media Site Formerly Known as Twitter is Circling the Drain

And it's all Elon Musk's fault

Elon Musk has been a very busy man lately. He is spending time at Mar-a-Lago so he could be as close to Donald Trump as possible, working with Nigel Farage in the UK and Alternative für Deutschland in Germany to elect far-right governments in those countries, and fighting with the MAGA rank and file over the issue of immigration and H-1B visas while, at the same time frequently posting on his own social media platform that he owns while also running Tesla, SpaceX, and other companies that he currently owns. It makes one wonder when he finds the time to actually sleep unless that Ketamine that he's been taking is keeping him awake at nights.

But now there seems to be limits with Musk's intensely busy schedule and it's about the social media platform that was once known as Twitter until Musk decided to remane it as X, which trashed a globally recognized brand name and bird logo. When we last left off yesterday, Musk helped to create a schism on Twitter/X when he came out in favor of H-1Bs, told those who opposed that they can “Take a step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face,” and removed the paid subscriber blue checks from MAGA people like Laura Loomer when they questioned or opposed Musk's stance on H-1Bs, which forever contradicted Musk's stance that he is a free speech absolutist.

This morning Elon Musk came out with this tweet that has incited longtime Twitter/X users even further.

Algorithm tweak coming soon to promote more informational/entertaining content. We will publish the changes to @XEng.

Our goal is to maximize unregretted user-seconds. Too much negativity is being pushed that technically grows user time, but not unregretted user time.

He's a fine one to talk about negative posts on Twitter/X because he also spent a huge chunk of the same morning tweeting about alleged Muslim rape gangs preying on young white girls in the UK, such as this one.

Apparently there was a child sex abuse scandal in 2014 when groups of British Pakistani men had allegedly abused thousands of girls in small towns in England over the past several decades. Musk’s interest in this issue appeared to peak after a new report from right-wing news station GB News claimed the current Labour government has failed to protect the victims by refusing to sanction a government-led inquiry. Basically Musk is using a right-wing media report—without trying to corroborate this story with other media outlets to see if it is even true or not—to hype an incident that came to light ten years ago to paint a portrait of brown Muslim men raping white girls right now in an effort to attack Prime Minister Keir Starmer and ultimately help Nigel Farage get elected. He even retweeted this tweet from the notorious right-wing vatnik Tommy Robinson to drum up images of maurauding Muslim men ready to rape white girls while calling Robinson a political prisoner because he is currently serving in prison for a contempt of court charge.

There's no denial that the original incident was horrifying but Musk's sudden interest in tweeting only about this story could potentially harm UK politics and it's an example of the type of negativity that he wants to see reduced on Twitter/X.

Getting back to Musk only wanting to see more positivity on Twitter/X, he retweeted this tweet from Ian Miles Cheong, the Malaysian man who pretends to be an American even though he has never been to the US, where Cheong wrote “I set my posts to verified accounts only and it’s been tremendously helpful in cutting down spam, and payouts from 𝕏 are up by 20%.” Musk added this comment: “Worth doing.”

This has further incited the MAGA base, such as Jasmine Keith, who tweeted:

“We were lured here for the promise of free speech. We all jumped at the opportunity to pay to support the movement that leveled the playing field. We championed Elon and supported and welcomed him with open arms as he joined MAGA. Then we watched as account after account was demonetized, stolen subscribers and eventually suspended. Now we’re told to zone out on entertainment content and pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Only share positive content and pretend the world isn’t burning down around us.

What the fuck kind of game is this?”

This most recent antic is only going to hasten more people departing to Bluesky, which has now gotten the old flavor of what Twitter used to be before Elon purchased it: a mix of political talk, photography, music videos, talk about geeky subjects, films, books, and a variety of other topics. What's more, the people who run Bluesky aren't making posts that are designed to rile up people nor are they openly hostile to other sites like Wikipedia or Substack. Right now I'm seeing Twitter subscribers cancelling their paid subscriptions, which is the best way to register your displeasure with Elon Musk.

I've also seen people take Musk's advice for more positivity by blocking Musk's account.

In all seriousness, people need to stop their paid subscriptions to Twitter/X. Even if you are making money right now, there's a chance that Musk may do something with your account that will screw your ability to earn an income from the platform in the future. Right now paid subscribers have complained about their tweets being demonetized and shadow banned, such as this one.

Additionally more and more users have left Twitter/X for Bluesky in recent months because so many people are fed up with Elon Musk so your tweets will have less people actually reading them.

At this rate it's only a matter of time until Twitter becomes as relevant to the average social media user as Gab or Truth Social and only far-right users will be the only ones using that platform. Which is a shame but I've seen that happen before, such as with Minds.com, which was an open source social media alternative that had an interface similar to Facebook. It was a nice place to visit with a diversity of opinions at first until the far-right took over that platform and they gradually turned it into such a hellscape (that included QAnon and clips from Alex Jones’ InfoWars show) that I ended up leaving.

Basically Twitter will suffer a similar fate as MySpace—a once-popular social media site gets so ruined by new ownership and it becomes so completely irrelevant that it still exists (barely) but most people won't join it.

Anyway, I have an account on Bluesky myself so you can follow me at kimberlyannkeyes@bsky.social in addition to this Substack.

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