Well, so far I haven’t noticed any changes, maybe because I don’t follow politics on Twitter. The vast majority of my feed is about pop music or air travel, my two obsessions.
The critical factor for me is whether they, e.g. the artists I follow, leave.
I think that when their toxic fanbase is allowed to act without consequence, there will be a fairly quick exodus to platforms that do not allow such abuse.
We’ll see, either Musk sticks to his guns and allows any legal content, regardless of the wants of users and advertisers, or he ends up basically just reinstituting the policies that twitter and other social media sites have found are necessary to have a profitable and productive site.
One Twitter user will kill another over a comment, it’ll be a huge media conflagration, the guy will be called the Twitter Killer, welcome to social media ownership, Elon, thanks for the 4x stock payout and $60,000,000 buyouts!
Signed,
Jack, Parag, Ned, and the ex-Twitter team.
I’d be surprised if this hasn’t happened.
I’m sure the fired execs with their eight figure severance packages are quite happy about getting paid extremely well for no longer dealing with the stress of trying to herd a hundred million cats.
While I’m sure the mods here love their jobs (and we love you), they’d not be too upset about being forced to walk away with a $60,000,000 check.
Individual artists and actors leaving Twitter after floods of abuse happens regularly already, so I’m definitely not betting against that!
Right, and that’s with at least some level of moderation control.
Get rid of even that, and noone is going to want to promote themselves on that platform.
The bigger question is whether an existing platform is positioned to take advantage of the growing discontent, or if we’re going to see a new alternative network like Truth Social, except this one marketed as an intelligently moderated public forum.
If this place were run like a damn business like it should be, this would actually be exciting times for the Straight Dope!
Instead, it will be another growth opportunity missed.
I’d assume mostly Facebook and Reddit.
What happened to the good old RSS feed?
Funny that Merriam Webster’s defines “elongate” as
1 : stretched out
2 : slender
And slender as:
[…] 2 : limited or inadequate in amount or scope : meager
Nice things you can do when you ignore the context. I whish elongate a successful hashtag future! I might even watch the video in the link. Later.
ETA: No idea what has happened with Stranger_On_A_Train’s link to YouTube. Up in post 137 or so it still works.
GM has suspended their advertising on Twitter.
Bluesky, led by Jack Dorsey, just went into beta.
So apparently, the second largest owner of Twitter is Saudi Arabia.
As I posted earlier in another thread that is basically a clone of this one (why do we have multiple threads about exactly the same damn subject?) Twitter already has a Trust and Safety Council that has been advising it on appropriate moderation policies, but Musk apparently didn’t know that. Or else he wants to set up his own version, which will have an entirely different outlook on things.
Specifically, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who is a far-right reactionary with close ties to the Murdochs, and once owned substantial shares in News Corp. The other Saudi owner, KHC, is really just Alwaleed’s investment firm. So Twitter is now owned by a Trump-loving psychopath and a right-wing Saudi reactionary. Sounds like it has a really bright future! 
Elon retweeted a fake news source that claimed that Paul Pelosi and the attacker were in a drunken gay tryst. This is the same site that claimed that Hillary is dead and replaced by a body double, that sunlight can cure covid, and that Bill Gates is giving people polio. Is it possible to get the site’s owner banned for posting fake news?
BTW, the only “reporter” that claimed that the attacker was wearing only his underwear has retracted that claim, though that isn’t likely to lessen the right wing reposts.
I don’t know where it came from, but after the Florida/Georgia game in Jacksonville, somebody projected “Kanye was right about the Jews” on the outside of the stadium.
So any fears that Twitter might devolve (further) into a right wing misinformation superspreader machine perpetuating the fall of intelligent discourse in America can be scratched from the “potential” category.
Elon decided to delete it, for whatever reason, but it isn’t a great signal to sane users and advertisers.
If I may… and I am neither the OP nor a mod… I may suggest that posts regarding the political implications of this buyout be focused on this thread here:
While this thread be dedicated to the business aspects and the impact on Twitter itself.
Just a suggestion.
Anyway, to this topic, the following is being reported:
Of all the things Elon could have done to kill his site, this is one of them. Twitter is a website which, somehow-someway-somewhen got people as diverse as Stephen King, Barack Obama, Taylor Swift, and more to generate… FOR FREE… tons of content, words, images, videos, words, and entertainment.
AND NOW YOU’RE GOING TO CHARGE STEPHEN F-IN’ KING TO WRITE FOR YOUR WEBSITE? AND YOU THINK HE’S GOING TO PAY???
Jesus wept.
Another person noted that you can tell that “trending” is being manipulated because “Elon Musk” hasn’t trended AT ALL.