Twitter

Elon Musk’s Twitter is holding a massive auction to sell its surplus office assets — and it is quite an eclectic selection. Cockburn is wowed by what the company's old guard has blown on superfluous products (the Kegerators, however, were an excellent choice). Here are some of the most interesting "assets" Twitter is liquidating. Neon Twitter Bird Light Electrical Display With a current bid of $35,500, this display tops the list for expensive lots. Ideal for anyone who wants a giant glowing bird in a booth for their living room. At ten feet tall, you may have to carve a hole in the ceiling to fit it into your home. Twitter Bird Statue Want to save a little money but still have a giant blue bird? This lot is the right fit for you!

With the recent release of the “Twitter Files,” we’ve learned what so many of us already knew. Or I should say, strongly suspected. The government has been colluding with social media companies — in this case Twitter — to censor people and content that do not support the agenda of the Democratic Party. The primary focus of the Twitter Files thus far has been on election interference and the banishment of President Trump from the platform. Multiple government agencies — including the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security — were involved in tracking individual citizens and pressuring Twitter to de-platform them. What remains to be clearly laid out is why and how more than 11,000 people were banned for questioning Covid policy: lockdowns, masks and vaccine mandates.

Another day, another headline about Elon Musk. But as the new Twitter CEO has announced plans to resign in the future — only after finding a suitable candidate to replace him — we may see a bit less of him soon. But who would be foolish enough to replace him? Cockburn has put together a list of potential heirs. Jared Kushner The former senior advisor and current son-in-law to Donald Trump may not be accustomed to the tech world, but he does have the face for it. Kushner also is a proven ally of Musk, after appearing alongside him at the Qatar World Cup final last week. He’s also in the market for a job after turning down his father-in-law’s offer to help run Trump 2024...

He may have been racking up the hours at the office lately, but even Elon Musk knows when to take a break. The world’s second richest man was spotted in Qatar yesterday at the FIFA World Cup final between Argentina and France. What’s weird about a rich man going to a rich-person-thing, you ask? The fact that he was in the same box as Jared Kushner… Watching Argentina beat France on penalties capped off a frenetic few days for the new Twitter chief. Earlier, he had kicked a number of tech and "disinformation" journalists off his app for supposed breaches of Twitter policy.

Since Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, the script has been flipped. Pontificators at all points of the ideological spectrum are spinning to figure out what his intentions are with the platform and how that pertains to platform moderation going forward. Musk is seemingly making up Twitter policy on the spot by tweet — and then asking his team to come up with a justification post-tweet. This has happened on several occasions. His actions all came to a head Thursday night when Twitter, apparently under the direct instruction of Musk, suspended the accounts of several high-profile journalists from the New York Times (Ryan Mac), the Washington Post (Drew Harwell), the Intercept (Micah Lee), Mashable (Matt Binder), Voice of America (Steve Herman) and CNN (Donie O’Sullivan).

The gradual release of the Twitter Files is impressive in its scale and its revelations about the internal workings of Twitter over the past several years. The cooperative release of information was driven by new Twitter chieftain Elon Musk, via a collection of heterodox thinkers such as Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and Michael Shellenberger.

Twitter probably isn’t going anywhere. Major platforms don’t just vanish, after all. If we’re not still posting in 2023, then I’ll buy you all a drink — a bet you poor saps won’t be able to hold me to because you won’t be able to find me on Twitter. Still, if Musk’s “decimate and innovate” plans don’t work then Twitter will decline. It might get slower and buggier and more prone to crashing. Platforms don’t have sudden deaths, but they do have slow and painful ones. Even Myspace still exists. Will Twitter follow it into online obscurity? Not soon, perhaps, but it will in the end. Nothing lasts forever. So our thoughts turn meditative. Writers sometimes comment on Twitter as if it has trapped them in a toxic relationship.

It’s been less than two weeks since Elon Musk took over Twitter — and Cockburn is finding the app more chaotic than ever. The news of the tech takeover really separated the kids from the grown-ups. One by one, the haughtiest users have bravely announced their departure from the bird website. Ciao! The latest to go is the British actor Stephen Fry, who posted a picture of Scrabble letters spelling out "goodbye" to his 12.5 million followers. He’s since headed over to Mastodon. Never heard of it? Neither had Cockburn until he got his tech-savvy nieces to give him a hand. And now he can say, with authority, that it is even worse than Twitter. When signing up to Mastodon, users choose a "server," which is based on your interests. "Mindly.