As many of you readers may know, Twitter was recently bought by Elon Musk, and his management of the company has been quite controversial.
One of the bad ideas Musk has done during his reign of twitter was rebrand the company to X. This is probably his most well known change of the company. Many people are upset with this and not many know X by its name. This is especially dumb when you stop to consider that Twitter was one of the most known domains ever. Musk seems to have a fascination with the letter X. He owns another company called SpaceX. He also owns another company named PayPal, which he wanted to call X.com before they settled on the name.
Another thing a huge amount of people are upset about is the verification subscription. Before Musk’s takeover of Twitter, there was a verification system in place which verified celebrities or companies so that users knew if an account was an actual celebrity or company. Musk made the decision to make verification a paid subscription for $8.00 a month. Obviously this led to people impersonating big brands and celebrities, defeating the whole purpose of the verification system in the first place.
Besides the blue checkmark, there are two other checkmarks that you can get on twitter. One of these is the gray checkmark, which can’t be purchased and is reserved for people with a large amount of political power. The other is a gold check mark reserved for large companies and corporations. Gold check marks are available for purchase and are priced at 1000 dollars a month. This is horribly overpriced and yet another example of greedy behavior by Musk.
These decisions so far have just been poor or greedy decisions, but this one is criminal. With the change of verification system, Musk announced that if you are not verified then your messages will not be pushed to peoples recommended pages. This is a violation of the freedom of speech and is borderline criminal. To force people to pay to express their opinion properly is inhuman. Bullitt East student Alyson Sherrard said that “I feel like he’s trying to change Twitter too much. He fired a lot of people and is trying to make Twitter too modern so it’s not as funny as it used to be.”
“I think Elon’s management is hilarious. […] him running one of the biggest social media platforms in the world made a lot of changes to how people treat the platform.” Said Hamilton Wise. Judging by the results we got from these interviews we can see that most students aren’t happy with Elon’s Management of the company.
