by Kate Hedrick
Arts, Style, & Beauty Editor
The following story was written by a student on the staff of The Jaguar Times as part of Hilliard Bradley High School’s Journalism Production course.
Social media platform Twitter has existed in relative peace and stability since its inception in March of 2006. In October 2023, entrepreneur Elon Musk acquired the platform for 44 billion dollars.
Since becoming the site’s CEO, he has garnered intense criticism for various decisions he has made. “He is implementing things just to do it. None of it helps, it’s just unnecessary,” says Ismail Elmajdoubi (12) when speaking of Musk’s new decisions for the platform.
From eliminating blue verification check marks for those who refuse to pay a monthly fee to disabling software crucial for the operation of beloved Twitter bot accounts, here are the main reasons why many are dissatisfied with how Musk is running the website.
Twitter Blue
Twitter originally introduced the account verification system as a means of confirming that an individual account was who they claimed to be. Public figures, organizations, and businesses would be given a blue checkmark next to their display name. Musk has introduced a major overhaul to this system.
As things stand now, Twitter users can now be verified for 8 dollars through a system called ‘Twitter Blue’. Elmajdoubi sums up the issue best, stating “He created fake checkmarks which make verification checkmarks useless, ruining their purpose.” Twitter Blue is a sudden and drastic departure from the way verification has been handled for years.
In April of 2023, Musk began removing so-called ‘legacy’ checkmarks, holdovers from the previous verification system, from accounts who are not subscribed to Twitter Blue. However, it’s not that simple. Musk has stated that he is paying for Stephen King, LeBron James, and William Shatner’s blue checkmarks, despite none of the three buying into the service themselves.
Other Twitter users have retained their checkmarks with no public statement from Musk, despite them stating that they have not purchased Twitter Blue. This has stoked even further controversy, with prominent users on the site repeatedly changing their display names to get rid of the blue checkmarks, only for Musk to add them back.
The Bot graveyard
Bot accounts (accounts not operated by humans) have been a part of Twitter since its inception. While many bots are nuisances that spread spam, others exist for fun, such as those that post pictures of cute animals on the hour. Others serve an important function, such as the NWS Tsunami Alerts account.
Samantha Hendrickson, an Associated Press reporter affiliated with The Jaguar Times, states that this account’s functionality was compromised by another of Musk’s controversial decisions: completely gutting free access to the software that many bot accounts run on, known as API. Both versions of the software are unavailable unless the creator of the account pays for it, similar to verification through Twitter Blue.
Fortunately, the account’s API access was restored, but only after the team behind it contacted Twitter. Still, they are not entirely certain that their alerts will come out on time, stating in a tweet that they are “reasonably confident it will work & we can alert you in a timely manner here.” Safe to say, Musk’s efforts to curb spam bot activity have left many innocent accounts in a precarious position.
Many bots have been digitally laid to rest in The Good Apps Cemetery, a website cataloging the many bots whose creators either couldn’t or wouldn’t pay for them.
Link to the website mentioned above: https://thegoodapps.rip/
While these are the two factors that have thrown Twitter into chaos in recent months, this is by no means the end of users’ grievances with Elon Musk. Other complaints include more lenient enforcement of rules against hate speech, more frequent website crashes, and downgrades in the site’s user interface (UI) such as splitting up tweets into ‘following’ and ‘for you’ tabs, much like on TikTok.
Whether you love or hate the decisions that Musk has made, there is no doubt that his ownership of the platform has been an influential one.
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