Musk should delete Twitter and put it out of its misery
Elon Musk has touched down on Twitter buying it for $44bn. Was this wise? Who uses Twitter any more? It’s unravelling faster than a ball of yarn on a windowsill in the eyeline of a cat. The fact that Twitter was so desperate to sell was certainly a cry for help. It’s heading the way of Facebook, now little more than a jumble sale of outdated ideas, radical rants or to check which of your former friends is a closet racist or xenophobe.
Twitter is heading the same way, with a scrambled timeline that is hard to navigate and never loads anything in a sequential order. When a tweet does go viral it is to home in on a celebrity’s wrongdoing or to gasp in horror at the unsurprising wrongdoing of the Trump administration.
Musk has a vibrant need to be liked so perhaps he and Twitter are a perfect match. Should Twitter be torn asunder into shredded tweet and deleted for good? Maybe.
He chose a strange time to buy Twitter. It has been running behind Instagram for ages, which is now overshadowed by a shinier and fancier TikTok.
Twitter is also a minefield. If you want to say something on the internet these days, you are safer behind a photograph and a closed caption. Typing anything leaves you vulnerable to going viral in the worst way. It’s safer to be a photographer than to suffer as a pariah.
Can Musk make the blue bird sing again? His statements have been vague with phrases like ‘freedom of speech’ which read dangerously like a dedication to reactivating Donald Trump’s account.
The UK government and European Commission gave him a gentle reminder to protect the rights of Twitter users. We are seeing new regulations pushed forward such as the Online Harms Bills. Musk has a naivety that won’t work when he realises the challenges involved in moderating content.
He says he wants to make the platform advert-free. A naive move as Twitter income relies on 90 per cent from adverts. If he really wants to make a statement, put it out of its misery and delete it before it forever dooms itself. That would be something to Tweet about.