Elon Musk Gave the Crazies Blue Checks. Now They’re Turning On Him.
Evan Agostini/AP Photos
When you’ve lost Catturd…
Elon Musk is getting buried in a pile of outrage from his Twitter fan base over the new CEO he’s tapped for the social media company — and it’s a specific brand of outrage the Chief Twit himself has stoked.
Musk announced Friday that he was naming Linda Yaccarino, confirming news reports. According to Musk, he plans to “transition to being exec chair and CTO, overseeing product, software & sysops,” while Yaccarino “will focus primarily on business operations.”
Yaccarino previously served as the advertising chief for NBCUniversal — stepping down effective immediately on Friday — but it is her affiliation with the World Economic Forum that ruffled the feathers of many of Musk’s most ardent fans on the birdsite.
Infamous gadfly Catturd, who until recently was a vocal champion of Musk’s leadership of Twitter, posted a link blasting the WEF as a “notorious” organization that “brings together globalist political, corporate, and non-governmental organization elites every year at the Davos resort in Switzerland to push its Great Reset agenda” — and that was one of the most restrained descriptions found among the blue check brigade.
Even before Yaccarino’s selection was officially announced, a number of right-wing personalities zeroed in on her connections to WEF as a “huge red flag.” The confirmation was fuel to the digital fire, with some of the Twitter Blue subscribers who have hailed Musk’s slashing of Twitter’s workforce, changed moderation standards, and fostering of conspiracy theories now expressing doubt that the world’s second richest man wasn’t actually fighting for them.
Friday afternoon, #RIPTwitter was trending, and there were many tweets criticizing Yaccarino on issues related to the Covid-19 pandemic, her suspected liberal political sympathies, and a general suspicion of “globalist” organizations.
Catturd was unsparing in multiple tweets about Musk’s decision, declaring this showed that Musk was just like all the other billionaires around the globe, plus speculating that the Twitter owner was purposely throttling “#RIPTwitter” from trending.
Dr. Anastasia Maria Loupis, a vocal critic of vaccines and pandemic restrictions, has been furiously tweeting Friday afternoon, attacking both Musk and Yaccarino.
In a particularly sharp execution of the FAFO principle, Musk himself is to blame for fanning the flames of outrage about the WEF, such as in a tweet from January in which he denounced the group as “increasingly becoming an unelected world government that the people never asked for and don’t want.”
Another decision by Musk has exponentially ratcheted up the lunacy. Previously, the blue checks were given to accounts that belonged to people who were notable for some reason (elected government officials, political candidates, actors, athletes, journalists, etc.) and had verified their identities. But Musk flipped that around, making the blue checks only available to those who subscribed to Twitter Blue (plus a few high-follower celebrity accounts) and opening the ability to buy the status available to anyone with a credit card.
Add in the algorithm change that boosts blue-check tweets, and now many of the anonymous, previously obscure accounts who had been transmitting conspiracy theories through the festering swamps of Twitter’s darkest depths to their 137 followers are seeing their tin-foil hattery boosted to the top of the timeline.
In other words, Musk’s tweets are getting absolutely buried in an angry swarm of weirdos and trolls.
Some of his previous fans were encouraging people to quit Twitter Blue over their objections to the WEF, and otherwise declaring their free speech paradise to be but a mirage. Many of them tagged Musk’s account as they voiced their heartbroken sense of betrayal that the billionaire had sold out to the other billionaires.
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