We Were All Supposed To Leave The Twitter Dumpster Fire. Why Are We Still Here?

In this photo illustration, a Twitter account of Elon Musk is displayed on a smartphone with a Silicon Valley Bank logo in the background.

I’m not sure when Twitter ― founded in 2006 as a fledgling microblogging network in competition with the MySpace juggernaut and the then-growing Facebook ― had its watershed moment and moved toward becoming the behemoth it is today. But my guess is it involved someone somewhere getting canceled. 

Around the early 2010s, Twitter hit an inflection point, becoming something that matters to the culture. We didn’t know or care about who ran it, but it became a global force, a free platform worth more than all the campaign dollars one could raise and an influencer that even its much-bigger brother Facebook could never quite match given their contrasting structures. 

As such, the callout section of the internet has served as a vessel to get ostensibly bad actors up outta here, or at least make it much harder for them to move going forward. It has helped to influence elections and, by proxy, public policy. It still routinely reminds the world that the underrepresented among us matter through the simple use of hashtags in front of catchy phrases. 

Twitter, along with a quarantine that bored people senseless, was the catalyst behind the unprecedented global response to George Floyd’s murder; arguably, former Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, would’ve skated like the countless other murderer cops before him if not for the dissemination of the video of him kneeling on Floyd’s neck, and the subsequent thunderous condemnation via social media. 

Recently, Twitter was used to warn startups to get $42 billion of their bread the hell out of Silicon Valley Bank before it collapsed.

For all the good it’s begotten, Twitter is also a petri dish for the worst of humanity: If you want to see the world at its petulant id ― folks being as nasty to strangers as humanly possible with boldness only keyboard anonymity could allow ― head to Twitter. It’s why I generally detest the network.

But I do still have my account. Love or hate it, it was 360 million users deep when billionaire man-baby Elon Musk took it over last October, dropping $44 billion into a passion project so he could get the attention he’s probably been craving since he was in Underoos. Everyone crowed about how Musk’s acquisition meant they were out…Black Twitter be damned. Folks insisted they were packing up their hashtags and cat videos and going elsewhere.  

Because to many with evolved sensibilities, Musk represents everything that’s wrong with…everything. A white South African who came up in Apartheid-era Johannesburg, Musk seems to move as adjacent to white supremacy as one can and still get pulled up on stage by Dave Chappelle. 

Musk proves time and again that intelligence isn’t transferrable, with his insistence on cultivating a platform of free speech that he uses as an excuse to support Nazisand make idiotic, demonstrably false claims like public schools being “racist against whites.” Musk’s “free speech” has Twitter users flinging N-hard-er-words like pebbles in a pond, but also seems pretty damn selective. 

He also created a noxious work environment in which he warned employees to strap infor insanely long hours or else, and canned a bunch of them only to rehire them when he realized he needed them. Some of those terminated were responsible for keeping your privacy tight, so some folks were completely vulnerable on Twitter (and probably still are). It was like watching the “monkey with cymbals doll” run the circus.