Banageddon. The Bannening. Bangate. El Baño.
Whatever the media decides to land on as a term for what happened on twitter last night is still up for debate (though I’m strongly pushing for the last one), there is going to be a lot of talk about what happened.
If you aren’t habitually on twitter like I am, you may not have noticed the saga that engulfed this hellish corner of the internet. In short, after a seemingly endless barrage of well-deserved ego punches to Elon Musk, like getting booed at the Dave Chappelle show, the Twitter owner took an increasingly common, toddler preffered, path of temper tantrums.
First he banned the elonjet account. An account run by a 19 year old that he actually offered to buy in the past for $50,000 that uses publicly available information to share the travel details of Elon’s private jet. His justification for this ban was a little suspicious.
The information is already public and can be sought out by anyone interested in finding it. So, it’s not even clear if the person who allegedly stalked Elon’s car used this information from the elonjet account. The other issue I saw was that immediately following these tweets, Elon shared a video showing the face and licence plate of the alleged stalker. Which, sure, isn’t real time location data, but unless that person ditches their car, it’s not a stretch to imagine Elon sycophants finding and doxxing the individual.
If the story ended here this would, unfortunately, have just been another day on Musk Twitter. But then the self-proclaimed twit decided to start banning notable journalists who were writing about what happened. Many tweeters started listing the journalists banned like @fabianeberhard while also pointing out one of the many hypocrisies of Elon.
After some attempts to justify his actions, one of the, more hilarious moments to me, was a twitter space being run by @katienotopoulos, brought to light a bug allowing suspended accounts to still enter twitter spaces. This meant, many of the now suspended accounts were discussing what had happened when Musk decided to hop on the space.
After getting asked a few basic questions which he had no real answers too, Musk jumped off the space only for things to get even weirder after.
The space abruptly cut out and kicked out all listeners. Then spaces was removed from the app. And, it seems, as though the recorded space is not available.
It’s really difficult not to look at all this and see what a truly enraged child Elon Musk has become. But here’s where things get difficult for me.
If you were of the opinion, as many were, that it was okay for Twitter to make banning decisions as a company when people you despised were getting banned, the argument still applies to people you like. And that is frustrating. And in those cases it was very easy for me to agree. And in banning these journalists it’s very easy for me to disagree. But, I do refuse to follow along with the argument that banning people you dislike is fine but not people you like.
However, Elon is absolutley deserving of all the criticsm he gets for this because it is petty and in no one else’s interest beyond his own. It’s also starkly against his self-proclaimed free speech warrior persona and the hypocrisy is where I find myself unsurprised yet extremely annoyed.
Elon did run a poll, as he is wont to do with major decisions, but in an unshocking turn of events, the decision to follow the poll results was sidestepped with the caveat that he had given too many choices and would run it again. At the time of writing this, it appears his poll is still going in a direction he doesn’t want it to.
The Elon owning Twitter saga is just heating up. I don’t plan on writing a bunch about it, but this felt necessary. If you want to follow me bashing Elon for his hypocrisy and general evil villian vibe, because I do very much dislike him, I do most of that on Twitter. Enjoy the weekend!