![]() ![]() After a truly chaotic legal discovery process, which even included some embarrassing texts, Musk was forced to seal the deal. A month later in May, he tried to kill the deal, claiming that Twitter had more bots than its public filings let on. Despite his fervent declarations about expanding “the scope and scale of consciousness” through public discourse, the billionaire got cold feet. “I don’t care about the economics at all.”Įven for one of the richest men in the world, $44 billion is a lot of money to cough up to buy a middling social platform. “This is just my strong, intuitive sense that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization,” Musk said at a TED conference on the day he made his offer. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO first announced his bid to buy Twitter in April 2022, zealously driven to rid the platform of spam bots and protect free speech. John’s Fondren, “and, first and foremost, is interested in making money and not so much in providing this digital heritage.Welcome to Elon Musk’s Twitter ( now X), where the rules are made up and the check marks don’t matter. “I think what these past two weeks have shown us is Twitter is a private company,” says St. But the drama has exposed the danger of trusting private companies with what we’ve come to consider public records. Musk might declare bankruptcy and restructure the massive debt he took on to buy the service. It might break slowly, crushed by the weight of activity with fewer engineers to work out the bugs. There’s no consensus that Twitter will go down in flames. Vine, Twitter’s long-mourned, short video service, has been archived in part by enthusiasts who created compilations of the platform’s best content and reposted it to YouTube, and the videos are accessible with direct URLs. Myspace lost years of photos and songs in a poorly managed server migration. There’s little precedent for this in the age of the centralized web: AOL Instant Messenger had a quiet death years after users fled the platform, and its primary content wasn’t public to even archive. If Twitter does go dark, it would be perhaps the largest wipeout of social data to date. Doing so requires getting verification codes from Twitter- they were not working via text but appeared to still be sending to email addresses. As of Monday, downloading a personal Twitter archive was getting trickier. Not everyone is ready to leave behind their tweets. “Do you have YEARS of tweets, likes, and DMs? Gather ’round, friends, while I show you how to DELETE THEM ALL (or as much as Twitter’s API allows).” “As you watch in horror/delight as Elon burns this site to the ground you might be pondering your privacy,” Semiphemeral tweeted Friday. Semiphemeral is one such service, allowing people to auto-delete likes and direct messages, in addition to their own tweets. ![]() These tools clear large swaths of tweets from an account, and they can allow users to sort by a tweet’s age and levels of engagement and select which tweets to delete. Both types of tweets can go viral and have lasting consequences.Īutomated tweet deletion services have risen up in response. Some are fired off by world leaders who incite violence and others by individuals who would be unknown private citizens, if not for their affinity for the bird app. That’s in part because capturing a stream of content that increases by the thousands each minute is a technical nightmare, but it’s also due to ethical concerns that not all tweets are created equally. Twitter’s founding premise-the 140-character (now 280) quip-doesn’t lend itself well to archiving. But there’s fear that Twitter’s troves of content, important for both historical and political impact (as well as a good laugh), could be lost. Whether Twitter goes bankrupt (as Musk himself has said is a possibility) or becomes an unnavigable stream of hate speech and deceptive parody accounts, the network’s future is unknown. And there’s an ongoing Google doc cataloging Twitter trends and memes, a guide that could serve one day to decode the hieroglyphics of the app. Others have started threads with screenshots of their all-time favorite tweets. People have downloaded their own archive from Twitter. From the moment Elon Musk closed his Twitter deal, the network’s diehard users have taken steps to eulogize it. ![]()
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