Elon Musk Is A Parasite Feeding On Twitter’s Strangled Algorithm
Regular Twitter users’ “For You” pages have become cesspools of Musk’s egomania
Elon Musk has wrecked the Twitter algorithm, and turned it into a brainless zombie of a social media platform feeding parasitically off the deranged neuroses of moronic echo chamber conspiracists so that regular users’ “For You” pages have become cesspools of Musk’s egomania.
I do not follow Elon Musk, and I neither “like” nor interact in any way with his unremitting replies of “woah” and “true” to dipshit retweets of misinformation from idiot obscurants on the mental fringes of civil and normal political discourse, but every scroll of my thumb shows me more. I also see nonstop pro-Trump video excerpts from conservative podcast bros I have never heard of and immediately dislike.
Algorithmically this makes no corporate sense. Twitter should be trying to feed me content I want to see in order to keep me on the platform and hopefully clicking on digital ads their analytical teams promise customers should interest me.
Instead, Elon Musk has installed America’s first 1984-style propaganda screen. Thankfully the “Following” page hasn’t been similarly infiltrated too much yet by Musk’s masturbatory attention-seeking and carnivalesque politicking for Trump, and if that’s not how you control your Twitter diet, you need to switch tabs.
What are the normies at Twitter — the execs and coders and regular people kind of employees — doing and saying about this? “For You” algorithms are the entire game for social media companies. Inspiring liberals to hate and boycott X is not good business sense. It’s positively uncompetitive against TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and all the other more successful and advertisingly successful scrolling companies. Twitter already had a dark reputation for psychologically depressing Americans with “doomscrolling,” but now it’s just an echo chamber for MAGA-enthused tech bro wannabes retweeting and commenting on misinformation amongst a bunch of bots sharing links to pornography, crypto scams, and foreign propaganda websites. Remember when Twitter had real advertisers, such as high-end fashion brands, Apple, Disney, etc.? Remember when Twitter used to ensure it wouldn’t place marketers’ ads on posts by Holocaust deniers and serial racists? Remember when Twitter kicked chronic vibe-killers off the platform? It was a messy, complicated system of imperfect rules, but virtually every aspect of Twitter is worse thanks to Musk opening the floodgates to the Internet’s gutter people’s worst impulses.
But I suppose it’s Musk’s company since he wildly overpaid for it, and he has the right to run it into the ground carnival-barking for the Internet’s fascists and foreign troll farms to reelect Donald Trump.
The hijacking of Twitter into X will go down as one of the most infamous and awful business rebrandings of all time. Ditching the friendly bird aesthetic of Twitter into a cold, soulless, and superficial “X” vibe automotivefied perfectly by his dumb Cyber Truck, and algorithmfied by a “For You” page that hasn’t figured out what TikTok and Instagram know I want to see: liberal and Democratic politics, art, history, tattoos, and videos of dogs doing funny things! Enshittification has set in.
This also makes no sense for Musk’s dream of having an “everything app” like China has. Mimicking the social media environment of a Leninist communist dictatorship personalized around an increasingly authoritarian “Dear Leader” is dipshit energy. How’s he going to convince the half of America he regularly calls a “Woke Mind Virus” to put all their money into his X bank app? He also claimed a year ago that by now Twitter would be a full on dating site. Who would want that? Who is asking for it? Musk is like Trump in the way he just casually bullshits anything to anyone out of an insatiable need for self-aggrandizement. And it betrays just an utter misunderstanding of Twitter’s social media niche.
In the Year of Our Lord 2024, it’s absolutely a cliché that all conservative attacks are projection, and Musk accusing the left of being a mind virus is 100% projecting what he’s doing with X. He has even managed to infect himself and rot his own brain with his propagandized delusions, hoist with his own algorithmic petard red-pilling himself into his Tim-Walz-described dipshit jumps into the air to make the shape of an “X” with his body. Elon Musk paid $44 billion to become the queen bee virus of the MAGA hive mind.
Diving into the deep end of MAGA, it’s utterly predictable that now it’s reported that he has had a bunch of private phone conversations with Vladimir Putin. Musk has a giant web of conflicts of interest with business interests all around the world where he wants users of X, customers of Starlink, and manufacturers for Tesla. I think we can all agree these conversations were not in single-minded furtherance of America’s national security interests.
Also, the Musk family has admitted he immigrated here illegally. It’s a paradox that Donald Trump is going full Hitler in his stated commitment to start a military force to deport illegal immigrants, but also wants to give the made up job of “government cost-cutter” to one.
Also, what will Musk’s cost-cutting entail? Republicans already want to end the Departments of Education and Energy, the FBI, the CIA, FEMA, and fire thousands of career civil servants and replace a relative few of them with loyalists like it’s the 1830s “spoils” system Congress had to eventually stamp out for its ubiquitous incompetence and rampant corruption. Will they sell off these institutional, public monopolies to the highest private bidders who will immediately concern themselves more with profit than fulfilling the societal responsibilities the institutions did at cost?
Given Trump’s penchant for all things Russia, it’s not surprising he’d be interested in copying the Soviet Union’s sudden shock privatization in the 90s that led to the somewhat hopelessly totalitarian oligarchy Russia suffers under today. The thing that explains Donald Trump’s psychology, politics, and public persona more than anything else is that he wants to be a mob boss.
It’s also not surprising that Musk, the biggest government welfare queen in the country, whose businesses all depend on federal grants and contracting, would want to put himself in charge of this government restructuring and inevitable sell-off under the guise of cost-cutting… for himself.
Take a huff of hopium with me, and daydream a moment: imagine on November 5th watching Trump lose, and then Musk losing his government contracts for being a hyper-partisan lunatic whose lack of loyalty to US national security interests can no longer be ignored, and then the Tesla board firing him for turning the company’s target liberal customers off their electric cars, and then SpaceX publicly admitting Musk has been much too busy refreshing @catturd2’s tweets and sharing God Emperor Trump memes literally all day and night for two years to deserve any credit for all the rocket successes. And then the Harris Administration deporting Elon Musk for being an illegal immigrant. 🥃
I wrote this comedy piece mocking Elon Musk a while back, and I think it holds up well: A Day In The Life Of Elon Musk
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