It has been over a year since Elon Musk made the announcement he was buying Twitter, and almost a year since it officially occurred Since then, the reception of the purchase, and subsequent changes to the platform, have been received very negatively. What went wrong? How has twitter changed since the purchase? And what do the students of Westfield think about it?

     Musk purchased Twitter in the fall of 2022. His main motivation was making it a platform for free speech stating, “free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy”. The issue of said free speech has been a huge talking point for politically conservative leaning people online but how does that apply to a private company like Twitter? It’s not what you might think. The first amendment of the United States constitution does prevent government censorship but this, however, does not apply to private social media companies which can regulate what is said on their platforms. When it comes to Twitter, it is one of the largest social media platforms, and with these platforms being such a big part of online discourse, it can be confusing/unclear whether or not social media should be held to the same law but as of right now, twitter can regulate what can/can’t be said.  

    Now how has the purchase of Twitter panned out? Is Twitter now a pillar of free speech for everyone? Unfortunately, no. Ever since the 44 billion transaction went through, it has been met with controversy after controversy with the changes Musk has made to the platform. The first of which being Musk’s recent bias toward super conservative ideology and unbanning of controversial figures like Andrew Tate and Donald Trump almost right off the bat. The spread of bigotry has also increased massively with guidelines being loosened to the point of the platform being the wild west of the internet. This immediately backfired and advertisers, one of the company’s main sources of income, pulled out in droves resulting in huge losses in profits with twitter losing 50% of it’s ad revenue. Though it doesn’t stop there, as to combat this Musk introduced Twitter Blue, a subscription service that gives you the  blue check verification automatically instead of it being reserved for large public figure accounts. Of course, paying eight dollars for a blue checkmark next to your username wasn’t worth it, and anyone who did make the purchase could be a victim of memes thrown their way; to counter this, a new feature was added where they could hide the checkmark and avoid harassment.  Obviously they were not making enough money, so they restricted the amount of posts you could view per day to 600 for unverified accounts and 6000 for verified Twitter Blue ones. Excluding verified accounts, 600 seems like a lot but it can be blown through pretty quickly. Overall, the site was way better before Musk bought it.

    To conclude, here are some thoughts from a few Westfield students plus my own personal experience., “twitter has its ups and downs, there are some funny posts but there’s also toxicity although that could go for the internet as a whole” stated Zay Thompson, 10. This also reflects the majority of the responses I got at this moment in time. There’s also the technical issues which have been plaguing my friend group. Most recently the app has been breaking the touchscreen on my friend’s phone though, as a disclaimer, it has not been confirmed that Twitter is the problem. 

    In my own personal experience, I would say that overtime it has definitely gotten worse for me; there’s just so many problems on the site that never existed. For example, I used to have unlimited messages but now I’m limited to 500; normally this would not be a problem but due to other circumstances my friends and I are limited to Twitter alone to communicate, and it can become an inconvenience. To be fair, though, in the end I have had a lot of fun being able to talk to friends and trolling is very funny when the person you’re doing it to has it coming. In the end I’m not here to tell you that you shouldn’t use the app. Even after writing this, I’ll probably still be using Twitter for a long time until my friends can find a better platform to communicate on. Just be mindful and find your own enjoyment outside of the site.