From Twitter to X a change for the worse

Elon Musk bought Twitter in October of 2022, and since then the company has been run into the mud. Not only did he throw away the iconic brand that was the blue twitter bird for an ugly math symbol, but many of his other changes have been horrible for users.

One of his worst changes has been his new verification system. Now instead of only verifying people who are famous and need to be verified, he opened it up to being able to buy verification through X Premium. By removing the one thing that differentiated the actual celebrity from imposters it makes the imposter’s job much easier. Right after he changed the verification system we quickly saw the consequences of the new system. Someone impersonated U.S. defense company Lockheed Martin and tweeted out that they would halt manufacturing to Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the United States and as a result the company lost more than $7 billion in their market cap.

Musk has also brought on his new philosophy of freedom of speech to the company, but it’s not a very good one. He constantly talks about how the app was ridiculed by “left-wing bias” and has unbanned people who he believes had been “censored.” These people include Andrew Tate who not only is a misogynist but someone charged with human trafficking and Jordan Peterson who was banned for his transphobic tweets. LGBTQ+ advocacy groups have also said that this approach is bringing on an increase in anti-transgender speech on the platform.

His new algorithm has also made the user experience worse. Musk has changed the feed to promote people who have bought verification, which is mostly filled with Musk fans who are usually the most toxic users, making the feed much less enjoyable if you don’t agree with them. My experience, as someone who is mostly moderate/Democrat, has seen a high increase of strong right-wing conservatism and anti-LGBTQ content which I despise to see.

One of the changes that just emphasizes the stupidity of Musk is how the app works outside of being logged in. The experience has become so bad it’s almost unusable. First of all, you can’t even preview Twitter without being logged in. Links to the website are even more unusable because of this; without being logged in, you can’t see any replies to the tweet or almost anything else you may want to see other than the tweet itself.

The big changes have been horrendous and the freedom of speech ideology even worse. Everything from X premium to the amount of hard work you have to do to look at a tweet from a link has made me wish that someday the bird comes back and everything goes back to what it once was.