Unhappy users all aTwitter
Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter sparked a complete meltdown among many left-wing users, with some comparing it to the end times and saying “the gates of hell opened” on the site.
Musk’s confirmation that he had taken control Thursday was widely cheered by conservatives hoping for an end to the platform’s censorship of news like The Post’s Hunter Biden exposes. But it also triggered alarms on the left, with some saying it was “an emergency” and “apocalyptic.”
“It’s like the gates of hell opened on this site tonight,” said Washington Post columnist Taylor Lorenz (inset).
The former New York Times reporter — who came under fire for doxxing the anonymous “Libs of TikTok” account — claimed she immediately started “getting more rape threats in the DMs than normal.”
“But can’t log off and miss the chaos!” she admitted.
Journalism professor Jeff Jarvis had called the takeover an “emergency,” saying, “Twitter is to be taken over by the evil Sith lord.”
“The sun is dark,” he later wrote while tweeting news that Musk “completes Twitter takeover and fires top executives.”
“I don’t want you to leave Twitter. I hope you stay and fight,” he told his 177,700 followers.
Former Huffington Post writer Michael Hobbes said he was “finding it pretty hard to make jokes about Elon buying Twitter.”
“Nearly every American media institution is now openly rightwing or obsessed with giving reactionaries the benefit of the doubt. What’s the case for optimism about the next decade at this point?” he asked. Almost as soon as news broke that Musk was in charge, many predicted the site’s impending demise.
“There is, both inside and outside the company, an apocalyptic feel to the ordeal,” Charlie Warzel said in The Atlantic. “Musk very well could kill Twitter out of malice or hubris, or through calcuboneheaded lated, deci— sions” or plain old “neglect.” Forbes sustainability senior contributor Dave Vetter asked his nearly 10,000 followers, “After Elon has demolished Twitter, where will you go?”
He said Musk’s free-speech policies could only mean the platform will be “swamped by Nazis, Pepes and other invertebrates.”
Uproxx writer Mike Redmond warned about how “quickly this whole site is about to go down,” adding, “It’s a miracle flames aren’t shooting out of it already.”
Fox News host Greg Gutfeld noted the irony of many using Musk’s own site to launch attacks, noting that “they said that on Twitter, so they should thank him for their free speech, the ingrates.”
But not everyone was panicking. “Why would I leave Twitter? It’s like living in NY and not taking the subway,” Silicon Valley exec Dave Winer tweeted. “Sure it’s dirty and smells bad, but it’s how you get places in NY.”