Well, I guess we need to talk about the elephant in the room. The elephant, of course, is Elon Musk, who has expressed an intention to buy all Twitter stock. There are a lot of reasons why the deal may not go through, and Musk may have already violated the purchase agreement. (There are also a few regulatory issues, but laws don’t apply to billionaires so we can discount that.)
But let’s assume for a moment that this turns out to be one of the rare instances where Elon actually follows through on what he says. What will that mean for Tweets of the Week? The answer, as it is with so many things, is “it depends.”
First, I’m not leaving Twitter. Surrendering the so-called “public square” to the fascists does not seem to me to be a winning strategy. So I’ll still be spending way too much time searching out the best examples of right-wing embarrassments and self-owns and bringing them to you. If anything, the expected influx of fascists should provide even more opportunities for hilarity.
Now there are a couple of possible changes to the platform that would make it impossible to continue as we have.. There has been talk of charging people to embed tweets, or denying the ability to do that to all but paid, premium accounts. This would be a terrible business decision, but the CEO of an auto maker that has recalled more than half of all the cars it’s ever made is much better at collecting government money than actually running a business. I don’t have Elon Musk money (I don’t even have Donald Trump money) so that would end my ability to bring you the tweets in the form I have been. There is a way that I could still present tweets to you, and that’s my secret, but it will severely limit the ability of commenters to contribute, which would severely impact the quality of this weekly feature. If it comes to that, I will share my method for showing good tweets, but be forewarned that it is a lot more work.
But for right now, there have been no changes that affect us, and I’m going to carry on as long as that is the case. I live in rural Texas, so I’m accustomed to being surrounded by fascists in an environment run by fascists. We’ll see how this all plays out. I’m not delusional enough to think anyone’s going to panic if this weekly post goes away, so I’ll just say that there’s no cause yet for mild concern.
But enough of my yakkin’. Let’s rock.