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Elon Musk Is Weaponizing Twitter Against Transgender People
A detailed look at how Musk acts with intentionality to target the transgender community
On April 20th, as the owner of Twitter scarcely for 6 months, Elon Musk followed through on his promise to yank the once-coveted “blue checkmark” from people who weren’t paying for it. Remarkably, on that same day of 4/20 (Musk has a predictable, juvenile sense of humor), a rocket launched from his Space-X effort successfully launched only to vaporize moments later in what his company called a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.” Many of his critics highlighted that euphemism as way for sugar-coating a disaster.
For Musk, though, the disasters weren’t only unfolding in the air. Here, in cyberspace, his latest changes to the platform were wreaking havoc, too, as formerly authenticated people were now thrown into the same unverified space the rest of us have been languishing in for years. Predictably, a new wave of impersonators rushed in, but this time many of them bore the coveted blue check mark—because they paid for it—while the OG accounts bore none. It was another moment in the slow-motion collapse of a social media platform, which had proved the most influential on the planet for the past decade or so.
