I haven’t logged into Twitter for several days now, not since Musk concluded his purchase of Twitter. I won’t go into any details, but the overall look is horrible. There’s talk about allowing Trump back on, and it appears that Ye and MTG are back on as well. I know I said I might hang in to watch Twitter burn down, but I don’t think it will. It will be a social media dumpster fire to be sure, but it won’t die because there’s too much invested in this purchase.

There’s a bit of conspiracy theorizing I want to indulge in. When Twitter (and other major outlets) started to kick off the worst of the worst, they went off and formed their own right-wing social media platforms, the most prominent being Truth Social. There are others such as Parlor and Gab. Regardless, the right wing social media platforms have been failures compared to Twitter, the original. There are many reasons, but the effect is the same none-the-less: nobody with any common sense, and critically, nobody that advertisers really care about, cares to go online with those platforms. Inertia and addiction being what they are, the great majority stay on Twitter. Truth Social in particular is on life support, and may actually die by the end of this year. So here’s my conspiracy theory: all the billionaire bros who tried to fund the alternate Twitters realized what a general cluster these Twitter-wannabes are and got together with Musk to help fund the $44 billion needed to purchase Twitter and take it private. They couldn’t buy Facebook or Instagram or some of the others, but they could swing for Twitter, and they did.

I have read that GM has frozen its Twitter advertising budget until the dust clears from this change of ownership to Musk. Others may follow. As I wrote in my last post, major companies do not like the kind of clientele that have flock exclusively to the right-wing platforms. If this keeps up with other major advertisers freezing their spending, then the Twitter platform may become a complete economic failure. Musk may try to compensate by instituting a full pay-to-participate platform, which may drive away even more users.

And I may finally call it a day and leave myself. That’s why the link is at the bottom of this post.

Ars Technica link to save your Twitter data before you delete your account: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/10/how-to-download-a-backup-copy-of-your-twitter-data-or-deactivate-your-account/