KYM Review: A Year On Twitter With Elon Musk

This year was the first full year of Twitter (and now “X”) under Elon Musk’s stewardship, and it’s safe to say a lot has changed for the once-omnipresent social media site — some would say for the worse.

Watching Musk tinker with Twitter in 2023 hasn’t quite felt like a genius businessman strategically adjusting a global brand to become more powerful and profitable considering the platform is now reportedly worth less than half of what he paid. Some might say it’s felt like a person crashing a $44 billion plane into the wall until it’s damaged potentially beyond repair.

The site has had an abysmal year by most standards. Key metrics are down across the board, and advertisers, which Musk has said are essential to helping Twitter turn a profit, are fleeing because of the conduct of its new owner.

Musk has publicly prognosticated that the absence of major advertisers will bankrupt the site, yet in the same breath told those advertisers to go, uh, “screw” themselves.

As it stands this month, Musk seems to have driven Twitter nearly to the point of bankruptcy in one year and seemingly singlehandedly, which has done little to help his reputation as a brilliant, rogue billionaire. Since purchasing Twitter, he has become its permanent main character as controversy after controversy put him at the top of his harshest critics and most diehard sycophants’ minds.

Here’s a brief, as-complete-as-possible summary of the year of Elon Musk on Twitter.

That Time He Juiced His Own Tweets

The issues with Musk had started before the turn of the new year, as he had already attempted to ditch the old verification system and had begun slashing Twitter’s staff with abandon, but his first real controversy of 2023 came during the Super Bowl when he was reportedly so incensed that President Joe Biden’s Super Bowl-related tweet got more impressions than his own that he called a 2:30 a.m. meeting to make his developers push his tweets in every user’s algorithm.

The discovery of this move had some claiming it was Musk’s “biggest loser move yet,” but it did work. In an Axios report from October, the only metric for Twitter that increased over the previous year was visits to Elon Musk’s profile.

His Feud With A Disabled Ex Employee

During the confusing era when it seemed as if everyone who worked at Twitter was getting fired in increasingly unceremonious ways, one ex-employee publicly goaded Musk into a spat in which the billionaire came out looking like a jerk to many on the site.

Haraldur Thorleifsson, aka Halli, stated he had been locked out of his work account for nine days but Twitter’s HR department was not responding to him, so he brought the question of his employment status to the “Town Square” of Twitter.

In response, Musk wrote Halli off, saying he was “independently wealthy,” did “no work” at Twitter, implied his disability was just an excuse to get out of working and ended it with “he’s just the worst.”

Musk’s characterization of Halli was largely deemed uncharitable, as Halli provided him with an extensive list of his accomplishments and duties at Twitter.

While the site wondered if Musk had just opened himself to a disability discrimination lawsuit, Musk apologized, saying he spoke with Halli on the phone and realized what he’d been “told” about Halli’s time at Twitter was not accurate.

The Late, Site-Breaking Doge April Fools Prank

Arguably one of the weirdest days on Twitter in 2023 was April 3rd. On that day, the site seemed to collapse entirely for no apparent reason. The site's blue bird icon had turned into Doge, the retweet button disappeared, the standard message saying a user had “retweeted” something disappeared and no one who was still working at Twitter was saying anything.

While some guessed the site had been hacked or had changed to become a grift for Dogecoin, the real answer seemed to be that it was a belated April Fool’s Day prank that was pushed out two days late for unknown reasons.

For many, the moment solidified the feeling that the inmates were perhaps running the asylum at Twitter, which only continued to seem more accurate as the year went on.

Getting Rid of Legacy Checkmarks

One of Elon Musk’s signature and most contentious changes to Twitter was altering the verification system of the website. Previously, a person of note would get “verified” on Twitter as a means to combat impersonation. In Musk’s vision, no one should be verified unless they pay for it.

In late 2022, this led to a wave of parodies and impersonations so widespread and damaging that Twitter had to reintroduce “legacy checkmarks” until it could implement Musk’s vision without causing massive chaos.

However, in late April, the removal of “legacy checkmarks” finally went through, and soon the blue tick, once seen by some as a badge of honor, became a badge of shame in the eyes of many.

The new Blue Tick, showing one paid for Twitter Blue, demonstrated to the entire site that a person with a checkmark was paying $8 a month for the perceived clout the checkmark imparted (or later on some of its added benefits).

Of course, this change also made the checkmark essentially worthless clout-wise, and its implementation led to an intense “Block the Blue” campaign in which Twitter users unenthused with Musk organized to drive his biggest fans and people who subscribed to the premium service from their timelines.

Insulting and Threatening NPR

It's well documented that Elon Musk has something of a combative relationship with the press, particularly if it's critical of him, and this came to a head in late April and May when he got into a feud with NPR because the publication elected to stop posting on the platform. This was because Musk labeled NPR “state-affiliated media,” a label he gave to propaganda outlets from China and Russia.

Originally, Musk threatened to give NPR’s handle to somebody else unless they started tweeting again. When an NPR reporter emailed Musk for comment, he screenshotted the email, tweeted it to his followers and declared, “Defund NPR!” When NPR reported on the story, Musk wrote an email to the reporter that simply said, “You Suck.”

This naturally raised quite a few alarms for other media publications, only they couldn’t get a comment from Twitter because Musk made it so emails sent to press@twitter.com replied with the poop emoji, resulting in yet another controversy.

Renaming Twitter X

Perhaps the greatest change to Twitter came when Musk decided to literally “kill” Twitter and replace it with “X.” The letter X, seemingly a lifelong obsession for the entrepreneur, appears to be mostly a symbolic change for Twitter, as the site still looks and functions exactly like Twitter, and the URL is still Twitter.com.

What it did accomplish, however, is to make news organizations all over the world have to type “wrote on X (formerly Twitter)” to describe anything happening on the site. Otherwise, the user base seems to have largely ignored the change, as the use of the term “Twitter” to describe the site is still rampant on the app and elsewhere online, whereas the use of solely “X” seems to only be used by employees and Musk’s biggest supporters.

Musk has voiced the intention of making “X” a broader app than Twitter was and has tested a game streaming feature, albeit to a mixed reaction. He also wants it to be a place for intense political discussion among world leaders, but so far, some of his biggest gets from the political sphere have only been Tucker Carlson and Ron DeSantis.

Time will tell if Musk’s ambitions for X will pan out or if the site will go bankrupt, as he predicted it soon may, before his vision for X is realized.

Cis is a Slur Controversy

In the latter half of 2023, Musk began boosting some conspiracy theory content and highly controversial bigotry-related posts with alarming consistency. One of Musk’s first major controversies related to bigotry came when he declared that “Cis” would be considered a slur on Twitter.

"Cis" stands for "Cisgender" and is used as a broad term to identify anyone who is not trans. However, some non-trans people, like J.K. Rowling, have claimed they believe it’s become a weaponized term that forces them to consider that Cis is one of several genders.

This vague “policy” (it’s unclear if it was ever enforced) alarmed many Twitter users who believed it would make the platform unsafe for trans users, while to others it appeared that Musk was joining the side of transphobes, which was also in line with Twitter controversially removing a policy against deadnaming and Musk himself mocking pronouns beyond cis ones.

“Asking Questions” About Covid Vaccines

In July, Bronny James, son of LeBron James, collapsed at practice due to cardiac arrest. With no other information, Elon Musk made a post wondering if James had suffered myocarditis as a result of the COVID-19 vaccine. The idea that the COVID-19 vaccine causes heart problems in young athletes is a widespread conspiracy theory with little evidence to support it.

Making matters worse, a community note was added under Musk’s tweet explaining that COVID itself is much more likely to cause myocarditis than the vaccine. However, that note was conspicuously deleted, and since few quite understand how the Community Notes function of Twitter works, some assumed Musk himself deleted the note — though that is unconfirmed.

Great Replacement / Antisemitism Tweets

The biggest and most current of Elon Musk’s bigotry-related controversies that had a significant effect on his platform is his perceived descent into antisemitism, which is extremely relevant right now amidst the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict.

Musk raised alarm bells earlier in 2023 when he compared George Soros to Magneto, saying the billionaire philanthropist wants to “erode the fabric of society.” But things got significantly worse in November when he commented on a tweet promoting the Great Replacement Theory, a conspiracy that says Jews want to invite minorities to white countries to destabilize whites’ power.

This got both Elon Musk and Twitter in a lot of trouble, and Musk, to this point, has arguably done a poor job digging himself out of the hole in terms of recovering from the subsequent negative effects on the site despite posting an apology regarding the accusations on his account.

For starters, major advertisers, including Disney, Paramount, NBCUniversal, Comcast, Lionsgate, Warner Bros. Discovery and Apple all pulled advertising from Twitter as a result of Musk's tweets. Media Matters reported that ads were being shown alongside right-wing extremist content, and Musk filed a lawsuit against the company — while inadvertently admitting their reporting was accurate despite his claims Media Matters manipulated data.

While this was going on, Musk posted an inaccurate meme pushing the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, inaccurately claiming based on a fabricated headline that a journalist who “investigated Pizzagate” was arrested for the possession of CP. This was inaccurate, as the journalist never reported on Pizzagate.

Then Musk went to an interview at the New York Times’ DealBook conference where he essentially told advertisers to "F themselves," specifically called out Disney CEO Bob Iger, but also admitted that without advertising money, the site would go bankrupt.

The striking interview made several believe Twitter would indeed soon go bankrupt, as Musk doesn't seem interested in wooing advertisers back to the platform based on his actions since the controversy — and that’s essentially where Twitter stands heading into the new year.

Community Notes Is Good!

However, while many of the changes at Twitter in 2023 have been maligned, the new (ish) Community Notes feature has been widely beloved by many. Community Notes is a Musk-approved feature where users can fact-check a tweet that contains misinformation or lacks context, and the note will show up beneath the tweet to provide more information.

This has led to several moments where viral tweets are basically spread with a viral quote-tweet dunking on it. Some examples of viral community notes from this year include the Community Notes alerting users that Tim Pool is bald, explaining how New York Times columnist David Brooks spent $78 on a burger and fries and correcting a George Santos meme and explaining to Elon Musk why Wikipedia asks for donations.

Looking for more of this year's best viral phenomena and memes? Be sure to check out our other 2023 meme roundups below:

• The Top 10 Memes Of 2023 — Coming soon…
• KYM Staff Picks Of 2023 — Coming soon…
• A Year On Twitter With Elon Musk
• Top Gaming Memes Of 2023 — Coming soon…
• Wackiest Stories Of 2023
• Trolls, Rumors and Hoaxes Of 2023 — Coming soon…
• Top Viral Videos of the Year — Coming soon…
• Top Slang Terms Of 2023
• Breakthrough Meme Formats Of 2023
• Most Impactful Fandoms Of 2023
• Top Anime Memes Of 2023 — Coming soon…
• Top Lewd Memes Of 2023