You have to wonder exactly who Elon Musk thinks uses Twitter apart from right wing nutters. The new move to remove blocking from the platform is as good as suicide.
Apart from pandering to bots and demographic minorities, the image of yet another Breitbart or QAnon going down in flames is a bit hard to miss. They were big. Now they’re fringe-fodder.
“X” could well be as good a name as any if this brand-identity-free user-losing mess continues. This used to be the place where the news broke, remember? Now it’s the news about a broken site that doesn’t work anymore.
It’s intriguing to watch any kind of mass media pandering to whatever vague mix of ideological nutters claim to be supporters of Trump or whatever. Even Murdoch seemed to be hypnotized by the inflated Trump hype balloon. Now he’s calling Trump a loser. What a coincidence.
Musk is another billionaire. He had the world’s leading social media site. He’s now catering to bots and psychopaths and ignoring real users. Wonder where that will go? Not really.
In business terms, it’s bat feces crazy at best. At worst, it’s some sort of DIY Death of a Thousand Cuts for Musk. The civil liabilities alone could be anything.
Musk didn’t have to do a damn thing to Twitter. He could have just sat there and raked in an average of $4 billion a year without lifting a finger.
…But no. That would have made commercial sense. We now have “X”. As a classic way of destroying an investment, it’s hard to beat this year of useless idiocies nobody wanted or needed. Anyone could start a new Twitter, with basics like blocking. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, or Apple could set up a competing platform with ease.
Twitter was useful. It was a good current feed. It was irritating, yes, but it could never have been as bad as this unsightly horror is likely to become.
Maybe it’s deliberate. Maybe someone wants to shut down current feeds. After all, the right can’t handle criticism, facts, or arguments of any kind. So obviously you need to abolish one of the platforms that got you elected in the first place. It’s about as self-destructively dumb as everything else the Morons Glee Club does.
It makes no sense at all to turn Twitter into a no-go zone for advertisers otherwise. That’s quite possible. A site with nothing but cranks and crackpot fanatics won’t last too long in the market. A lot of major advertisers have pulled their ads from other platforms for exactly that reason.
If you’re looking for a GPS map of how not to run a social media platform, this is it. “Now drive your investment into the ground for a year or so…”
Wake up, Musk. At this rate, when Little Donny rides his popsicle stick off into the sunset, you’ll be going with him into the bottomless pit of failed right wing media.
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Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.
