Twitter is a private company and its owner, Elon Musk, can do whatever he wants with it. If he wants to squander the 44,000 million dollars he paid in a semester, it is his right. If you want to lay off half the workforce overnight, that's your right. If you want to turn the social network into a restricted place and disrupt its essence, you are within your rights. But users also have the right to start looking for alternatives to the attitude of a magnate who has entered the digital agora like an elephant in a china shop.
The Twitter part of El Patio Digital is beginning to see worrying signs and the atmosphere that is breathed is increasingly rarefied. That the social network has been valued by the founder of Tesla and SpaceX himself for less than half of what he paid just six months ago is no coincidence. He told us that it was going to be a revolution, that freedom would finally return. And it is true that, at first, there was some hope with the operation. But, today that horizon is not there nor is it expected. On the contrary, in this six months Musk has dedicated himself to modifying the algorithm so that his comments appear prominently on our walls and he has littered the timeline with tweets that do not interest us. Little more.
And everything can get worse. In just half a month, Twitter could take another step towards the abyss. On the 15th, as announced by Musk, the new verified, payment, and account system comes into operation. It will cost eight euros per month and will cause only validated profiles to have visibility in the "for you" section. That is, either we pay 8 euros or we disappear from the main walls. Real democracy, yes, but after checkout and for those who can pay for it.
These are unflattering decisions for the future of the agora on the web. Twitter is a meeting place, sometimes perhaps for debauchery, which should only evolve to implement improvements, but always maintaining its essence.
If Musk ends up hitting the wrong keys, many already believe that they will have to go find another place to socialize. It is evident that the situation also worries companies and, of course, politicians. But the tycoon rules.
And of course there are other places in El Patio. There is Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon or even TikTok. But nothing would be the same without Twitter.
