The Hobgoblin takes a look at the latest scandal to sweep the streets of the tweets.

Everybody familiar with the Internet will undoubtedly also be familiar with the Titan of Twitter known as Elon Musk. Last year, in April 2022, he made the decision to buy Twitter. Online, there were growing concerns among Elon and the alt-right that the board who ran Twitter had no regard for free speech, because they were censoring disgusting racism and bigotry. Nevertheless, Musk saw a problem, so sought to fix it himself.

Many would think that spending $44 billion on a social media platform worth half that is a bad idea. Unsurprisingly, Musk thought it was a good idea, so went ahead and did it. Soon after, he realised that it was a total waste of money so decided to implement changes that would make his money back as quickly as possible. Knowing that Twitter is a free-to-use platform, many users hated the idea of being charged $8 per month to become ‘verified’. In fact, it’s recently become the case that even companies who want to be verified have to pay $1000 per month. So insecure is Musk that he’s removed the ability to tell who is actually verified and who has just paid.

Although the majority of users don’t support these changes, Musk has made it near impossible to do anything about it. Cannily, he removed Twitter’s board of directors, and made it so that Twitter Blue subscribers show up more often in tweet searches and on the timeline. Unfortunately, this means that everybody is becoming absorbed into his echo chamber of people who think monetising a free service is a good idea. Not the types of people to avoid confrontation, users are fighting back in every way that they can – but Musk is showing no signs of change. To sum up: no matter what people do, there will always be those who play the system to get their true message across.