With Elon Musk gaining recent ownership of Twitter, he has made many changes. One of them is firing workers. So far, Musk has let go of about half of Twitter’s workers this month. According to this New York Times article, musk also said that Twitter faced the possibility of bankruptcy and needs to be more “hardcore” to survive. Musk’s thought process is hurtful, but more towards Twitter. Musk’s actions are hurting Twitter because he has been pushing his political views on the app. Musk’s main reason for buying Twitter is to “help humanity,” but in reality, he’s doing the opposite. Many of the employees that Musk fired won’t have a hard time bouncing back, as their expertise is something every social media platform needs more of. 

Another feature that Musk changed on Twitter was verification. Now users can buy verification for $7.99 a month. This change has given many of the users a chance to verify themselves. This change led to many issues for the owner Elon Musk himself. Comedian Sarah Silverman changed her name and profile picture on Twitter to impersonate Musk and said a bunch of things. One of them being “I am a freedom of speech absolutist and I eat doody for breakfast every day.” Musk’s response to all the impersonations was, “Going forward, any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying ‘parody’ will be permanently suspended.” He also said that with a name change, the consequence would “cause temporary loss of verified checkmark.” With the change he made, he only created more issues for himself. The change makes it easier for any random user to buy verification instead of needing to verify with an I.D. which also makes it easier for any user to change their name while still being verified to impersonate someone with status.

Musk also took away content moderators. A content moderator’s job is to go over any tweet a user makes to check for hate speech or misinformation. His reasoning for taking content moderators away is that he believes that content moderators are controlling the amount of free speech a user can say. He also tweeted “Important to admit when I’m wrong & firing them was truly one of my biggest mistakes.” All of his decisions so far have affected the majority of its users negatively and Musk himself. Musk continues to bury himself in a deeper hole each day with all of the decisions he has made for Twitter. Not only will taking content moderators cause an increase in hate speech and misinformation but this will also allow anyone to say anything they want. This means that no matter how large a user’s platform is, they don’t have to watch what they say on Twitter.

With all the changes Elon Musk has made, his worst decision would be to bring back Donald Trump and Kanye West’s Twitter accounts. Kanye West has used his social media platforms to spread white supremacist ideologies. He has used his platform for many negative things which resulted in him losing access to his account. The same thing applies to former president Donald Trump. On Nov. 18, Elon Musk posted a poll on Twitter about whether he should or should not reinstate Trump’s account and the majority voted that he should. The next day he tweeted, “The people have spoken. Trump will be reinstated. Vox Populi, Vox Dei.” What caused Trump to lose access to his account was when he used it to incite violence, causing the Jan. 6 Capitol Insurrection. This is a mindless decision on Musk’s part and I would like for West and Trump to understand that they must watch what they say online.

This affects Park because we are all teenagers. All the changes that Musk has made will affect the way teenagers receive information, specifically on Twitter. We have all seen stuff on the internet and believed it without solid proof. That’s just how the internet is. People post stuff and get views, and when people post without fact-checking, misinformation spreads. An example of how teens have fallen for something like this was when TikTok was supposed to shut down. People heard things, but they weren’t fact-checking them which caused conspiracy theories to rise and cause many issues. There isn’t any solution to stopping the spread of misinformation, but the best any of us can do is double-check what we see on the internet. If there isn’t a credible source, it’s most likely fake. Instead of going on Twitter to spew hatred that would’ve gotten your account in trouble before, use Twitter to spread information and facts.