#RIPTwitter

Why is RIP Twitter trending?

The worlds richest man Elon Musk (after multiple attempts), finally purchased Twitter on the 28th of October 2022 for a whopping $44 billion. However, it hasn’t been a smooth sailing ride for the billionaire.

Laid off half its staff

Since taking ownership, Musk has taken control as Twitter's sole director and dissolved the board. Not only has he laid off some of the top directors, but he has also laid off half of the company's workforce and fired several employees who had publicly criticised him.

Musk said Twitter would need to be extremely hardcore to succeed. Those who choose to keep working at Twitter should expect long, intense hours. Those who left would receive three months' severance pay. Some employees who weren’t fired were reportedly instructed by managers to work 12 hours a day, seven days a week!

Blue tick drama

I’m sure you’ve all heard of the blue tick drama by now. Before Musk took over, the blue ticks were granted to celebrities, businesses and journalists verified by the platform to prevent impersonation. However, Twitter’s relaunched premium service allowed people to be granted blue check verification labels for $8 a month. As you guessed, this has caused havoc on Twitter, with users parodying everyone from Pope Francis to George W Bush. People were setting up fake celebrity and business accounts with the blue tick verification and posting ridiculous and sometimes offensive things. Musk tweeted that “too many corrupt legacy Blue ‘verification’ checkmarks exist, so he had no choice but to remove legacy Blue in coming months.”

Racism has spiked on Twitter

When taking over, Musk pledged to Twitter's advertisers he would ensure the platform is "warm and welcoming to all," not "a free-for-all hellscape where anything can be said with no consequences”. However, it has been reported by some researchers that the use of racist terms on Twitter has spiked after Musk's takeover. The head of safety and integrity, Yoel Roth, has stated that a small number of accounts posted lots of tweets that include slurs and other derogatory terms.

This is just some of the havoc that has been happening since Elon Musk has taken over twitter. It’s hard to know whether this is something that can be fixed or not. Many are saying that Twitter is dead, but is it? Will someone else take over Twitter? Who knows. All I know is, it’s going to be very interesting to watch how this all plays out.