The broken Twitter that everyone warned us about has arrived.



If you were accustomed to a time when Twitter — while far from perfect — was a place where you could dependably digest a wide range of breaking news, politics, celebrity gossip, or personal musings, it’s time to accept a new reality.

 

Twitter is becoming a degraded product.

In the four months since Elon Musk took over the company, the app has experienced major glitches — such as when, last week, users around the world couldn’t post tweets, send messages, or follow new accounts for several hours. While Twitter, like other social media networks, has always had periodic outages, under Musk, the app’s unpredictability isn’t just limited to technical issues. Musk’s erratic decisions are degrading the integrity of Twitter’s core product and alienating wide swaths of users.

 

Musk’s Super Bowl meltdown, as reported by Platformer, is one of the clearest signs so far of Twitter’s decline. Musk, apparently livid because his tweets about the Super Bowl were getting fewer views than President Joe Biden’s, flew to Twitter’s headquarters and ordered engineers to change the algorithm underlying Twitter’s main product to boost his own tweets above everyone else’s so that they show at the top of Twitter users’ “For You” page. Musk’s cousin, James Musk — who is now a full-time employee and a reported “fixer type” within the company — reportedly sent an urgent 2 am message asking all capable engineers to help, and the company tasked 80 engineers to manually tweak Twitter’s underlying system to promote Musk’s tweets.

 

Soon after the change, many users started noticing their feeds had been bombarded with Musk’s tweets. Musk seemed to acknowledge the phenomenon, posting a meme showing a woman labeled “Elon’s tweets” force-feeding a bottle of milk to another woman labeled “Twitter,” and later posting that Twitter was making “adjustments” to its algorithm.

 

The episode demonstrates how Twitter has become less and less dependable. The platform’s basic product design is now tailored to the whims of Musk, a leader who seems to prioritize his own image and “free speech absolutist” ideology above business interests.

Here are a few examples: Musk, in the free-speech spirit of letting people say almost anything they want on Twitter, restored the accounts of thousands of previously suspended users, including neo-Nazi and QAnon accounts. According to the New York Times, this was one of the driving factors behind an increase in hate speech on the platform, including a more than 200 percent increase in anti-Black slurs from when Musk took over until December 2022, upsetting many users who already faced harassment on the platform.

On the product front, Musk has rushed projects that have caused chaos on the platform. Musk’s most high-profile product, Twitter Blue, a paid version of the app that let anyone buy a verification checkmark badge, had a disastrous initial rollout. Musk — who has long beefed with the mainstream press — framed Twitter Blue as a way to take away the special privileges, such as checkmarks, that “elites” like journalists had on the platform, unless they paid up. But the poorly thought-out changes to Twitter’s verification policy ended up flooding the platform with spam, as newly verified accounts used their checkmarks to convincingly impersonate public figures, including Musk. The release was pulled back and delayed twice before finally coming out in December.

 

Under Musk, Twitter also recently blocked third-party apps that improved people’s experience on the app, like Tweetbot. While Twitter is promising developers a revamped paid version of its API, the way Twitter suddenly cut off access has soured its relationship with outside programmers whose add-on apps enriched the site.

 


Since Musk has laid off or fired more than half of Twitter’s staff, the people left to clean up the mess are short-handed. That includes teams that deal with fixing bugs, content moderation, and courting advertisers.

 

When Elon Musk first bought Twitter, even though many were skeptical about the billionaire, there was also some optimism that Musk could turn the company around. Investors hoped that Musk, the prolific and successful entrepreneur, could revive a company that was unprofitable and seen as not living up to its full business potential. Musk’s ideological supporters saw him, a self-appointed “free speech absolutist,” as someone who could make Twitter less restrictive and open to a wider range of speech.

 

Now we’re seeing Musk’s potential to improve Twitter — on the business and ideological fronts — unrealized.