Requiem for a Hellsite

Maybe goodbye, Twitter.

On the week of Monday, November 14th, 2022, in between a fire-hose of articles about Elon Musk’s mismanagement and mass firings at Twitter, a young woman posted a photo of some chili. She’d decided to cook it for her neighbors, young men who- she noticed by their trash- seemed to mostly eat fast food. It was the sort of neighborly gesture that is all-too-rare nowadays, and the young men seem to have appreciated it.

But on Twitter.com, a website that has for more than a decade been a worldwide nexus for news and information, the posts set off a firestorm. For reasons that are impossible to explain unless your brain has been permanently damaged by posting, this woman has, over the years, developed a small army of haters. Earlier this year a number of them spent months threatening to murder her pet pig. They decided this chili was an act of white supremacy, and potentially a violation of unclear pandemic protocols.

It was all nonsense, but for a few days tens of thousands of people marveled at the insanity of it all, as we’ve often done before. This time, our confusion mingled with a tinge of sadness. On Friday, November 17th, responding to an ultimatum by CEO Elon Musk, most of Twitter’s staff quit en masse. As I write this, the site is crumbling like the walls of Jericho.

I think it is likely that the people declaring Twitter on the verge of irreversible death are slightly hysteric, as is the custom online. Even so the prognosis is not good. And if all we were losing was the ability to torture the world’s wealthiest man and unhinged, chili-related discourse, that would not be such a tragedy.

Also on Friday, November 17th, a video began to circulate on Twitter of protesters, in the Islamic Republic, lighting the former house of Ayatollah Khomeini on fire. If this link still works when and where you are, I recommend watching it. The sound of the crowd cheering as the firebombs detonate and catch is intoxicating.

Frida Ghitis @FridaGhitis

The home (now museum) of Ayatollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic Republic, set on fire by Iranian protesters.

Hearing it brought me back to the heady days of Summer, 2020, when millions of us witnessed the first stages of an uprising against U.S. police in similar clips of blessed anarchy. The largest protests in our nation’s history followed, and a wannabe dictator lost re-election shortly thereafter. Twitter didn’t make all of that happened, but for many thousands of people who fought and cried and felt triumph in the streets, the 2020 uprising started when some tweet splashed across their timeline.

Rebellion has spread this way since, at least, the Arab Spring of 2011. At the moment there is simply nothing else on the open Internet that can do this as well as Twitter currently does. Perhaps this is a good thing. Most of the insurrections and revolutions that got their first oxygen from the bird app failed, often at the cost of catastrophic violence. Twitter was always good at making people care about things, if not much beyond that.

Should it perish, I’m sure it’s key features will be fulfilled by something else in time. A new app will take Twitter’s role at spreading the word when disasters strike. Dissidents will find new ways to share information about their struggles. Marginalized communities will build new methods of raising money and sharing knowledge. There will be a disruption, and a good number of people will suffer, even die. This is the unavoidable consequence of letting the world’s richest man make a key piece of global communications infrastructure his personal property.

There is, then, perhaps some beauty in the fact that one of the last actions people took, collectively on Twitter was another insurrection. This one was directed at the man who would be its King. Perhaps it will fail too, Elon will cling to power and, bit by bit, claw back functional control. If he does though, he won’t own Twitter, not really. The website that comes out the other end of that process will not be the one he spent $44 billion to buy.

All of this is getting beyond the thing I really wanted to say which is why I loved Twitter in spite of myself.

On October 31st, 2022, when this whole process was still new, Elon tweeted his first vague plans to make people pay for verification. His pitch was $20 a month, a ridiculous sum, and author Stephen King told him it was stupid, tweeting:

“$20 a month to keep my blue check? Fuck that, they should pay me. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron.”

The reason Stephen was so angry is sensible, when you think about it. He has nearly 7 million followers and tweets pretty regularly. Massive accounts like his aren’t Twitter’s customers, they are the business itself. But no matter. Musk responded, pitifully:

“We need to pay the bills somehow! Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. How about $8?”

Now the first comments are what you’d expect, a mix of anti-Musk lib types laughing at his bad business sense and mocking the idea of making Twitter’s most valuable users pay for the site. You’ve got your Musk defenders insisting the ‘blue checks’ are some sort of out-of-touch elite, one of my favorite deranged bits of right-wing online culture.

But then, a few comments down, there’s a post from a Zimbabwean journalist, named Hopewell Chin’ono:

“Good morning @elonmusk

For a lot of journalists in Africa, verification has helped us to not fall victim to State tactics to use our names to spread propaganda. I have been to jail 3 times inside 6 months for exposing corruption. Few African journalists will afford the US$20.”

Attached to the tweet were images from two Guardian articles about Hopewell. I’m going to quote from one now:

“Chin‘ono posted on his Twitter account that police had taken him from his house and said they were charging him with “communicating falsehoods”.

The arrest comes after Chin‘ono tweeted that police had beaten an infant to death while enforcing Covid-19 lockdown rules this week. Police later said the information was false.

Before the latest arrest, Chin‘ono was out on bail on separate charges of inciting violence after he voiced support for an anti-government protest in July and also on contempt of court charges for allegedly claiming corruption within the country’s national prosecution agency.

Chin‘ono is one of Zimbabwe’s most prominent critics of president Emmerson Mnangagwa’s administration, accusing it of corruption and human rights abuses. The government denies the charges.”

Hopewell is a Harvard fellow and an award-winning journalist who I was not aware of prior to this tweet. He is an extremely courageous man, whose reporting on corruption within the Zimbabwean government recently led to the sacking of the corrupt health minister. I would not have heard of this man without Twitter. And if Twitter weren’t the site that it is, he never would have had a chance to make his concerns public anywhere close to the CEO of Twitter.

I’ve wasted far, far too much of my life and time shitposting on Twitter. But moments like these, when I find myself connected to the life and struggle of a stranger I never would’ve met otherwise, it’s all worth it. Twitter is/was a stupid, cruel place, where people regularly convinced each other to become worse versions of themselves. But for years now it has also been the best way to connect, often accidentally, to the courage of strangers.

I’ll miss it.