this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2023
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Why is everything to do with this story completely unsurprising.
Because we've all come to accept that Elon Musk doesn't know how to run a social media site?
He knows how to run a social media site into the ground...
Which is probably the whole point. Make it seem like the site is failing because of mismanagement, and not that its failure was intended right from the start with a leveraged buyout saddling the business with an untenable $13bn of debt.
No, he's just dumb!
Yup, it's easy to forget that an important use of Twitter used to be finding out what was happening when propaganda was covering it up. It's how we learned about Arab spring.
If my life were at risk from my government, I certainly wouldn't trust Elon to keep me safe from them.
The Arab Spring is exactly one if the reasons Musk took over the site. That, and Peter Thiel's (Musk's old partner from PayPal) failed attempts at setting up a rival service.
They couldn't rope Twitter into line, they couldn't make a competing service, so instead they saddled Twitter with $13bn of debt so that it would die (or step into line if they felt like paying off the debt).
It's the same way Toys R Us went under.
Musk's antics over the last few months have been nothing but a distraction. The very purchase itself was a death sentence.
I don't know that he does.
We're still hearing about twitter and people are still using it.
I think what we're learning is that social media has more inertia than we might have thought, and it's actually incredibly difficult to kill it. This is a very bad thing as it allows someone like Musk to deeply alt-rightify what is fundamentally a public resource in private hands, but people will keep using it because...? I couldn't tell you why really, and I think most of us that have adopted lemmy are by nature not likely to really understand it.