Political Division

The funniest tweets about Elon Musk buying Twitter

By Rita S. Galiano

Have you heard of this guy Elon Musk? Well, he just bought an app. Mad.

Musk, a billionaire who works in cars and space but mainly works in memes, is set to be the new owner of Twitter after his $44 billion takeover bid was accepted by the company board today. Twitter is a popular social media app that a small portion of the population uses, but somehow has the power to disrupt our entire global socio-political system (along with its Facebook buddies, of course). Musk, a prominent app user who likes to tweet jokes that have already been tweeted by millions of college kids while complaining about “waking up,” has been trying to take over Twitter for three weeks. Given how lax Twitter has been in patrolling hate speech, political extremism, and outright lies about our government (including, of course, the 2020 election), many are concerned about what Musk, who says he’s buying Twitter to protect free speech, will do to stop misinformation and propaganda from being spread on Twitter. Does the embarrassment of Georgia’s unbalanced Congress Marjorie Taylor Greene, which called on Trump staff to enforce ‘Marshall Law’ to void the election through Jan. 17, 2021, will she be able to share her blatant lies and nonsense on Twitter again? Trump, who was eventually banned after leaving the White House, and after multiple violations of Twitter’s terms of service, will he return to the app where he once bleated as a child dozens of times a day? (Trump has already said he won’t return to Twitter even if Musk invites him to, but his own social media app, Truth Social, is such a disaster that it’s only a matter of time before Trump don’t throw it away and pretend it never existed. ) Does it matter that these two, or other far-right extremists who have been banned by Twitter, start using the app again, when there are still countless accounts and bots spreading the same kind of bullshit they would post on Twitter? Not really.

Some are celebrating Musk’s potential ownership on Twitter. Others are mourning the death of an app they have deeply mixed feelings about – an app that has allowed them to create and find communities of like-minded people, build lasting personal and professional relationships, but which has also been plagued by hate and harassment, a main driver of the extreme political division we see today, and is also very bad for mental health. You really have to rely on the bad actors on Twitter and the incompetence of the people running the joint; something that’s been responsible for so many jobs, friendships, and romances probably shouldn’t have such a toxic global reputation.

Twitter has also been crucial for comedy, both for people who do comedy and for those who just want a laugh. God knows how important that comedy section was; we haven’t been using them too much lately, but there have been months where hastily-gathered tweet galleries made up most of our traffic. (Well, with our hastily put together streaming comedy lists.) Today’s news that Twitter is acquiescing to Musk’s takeover bids was the subject of probably 75% of the tweets I read. I’ve seen today, from serious explanations of why this is concerning, to people claiming they’re going to quit the service, to (mostly) really good jokes about how stupid and shitty it all is. Let’s look at the funniest of these tweets, collected here for easy consumption. Who knows, with the notoriously prickly Musk taking over, this might be the last time you really make fun of the guy on Twitter, no matter what he might say about “free speech.”

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Rita S. Galiano
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