Since billionaire Elon Musk took over Twitter in October, the social media giant has become some sort of a “glitch station” where unexpected problems wait at every turn. In just less than five months, users have witnessed and experienced numerous problems, from the flood of fake accounts to outages.
Here’s the list of Twitter problems:
1. Wave of ‘verified’ fake accounts
Not long after Musk acquired Twitter, he introduced in November the Twitter Blue, a paid subscription service that allows anyone to buy a blue verification badge. The launch seemed to be poorly thought-out, resulting in many newly verified accounts trying to impersonate public figures or brands and scam users. This forced Twitter to relaunch the service in December.
2. Rise in hate speech
In efforts to promote free speech, Musk has allowed Twitter to restore accounts of previously suspended users, including those of neo-Nazis. This has contributed to the rise in hate speech on Twitter, according to research.
“Elon Musk sent up the Bat Signal to every kind of racist, misogynist and homophobe that Twitter was open for business, and they have reacted accordingly,” said Imran Ahmed, the chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate.
3. No more third-party clients
In January, Twitter quietly updated its developer agreement to effectively ban third-party clients such as Twitterrific, Tweetbot, and Fenix — all of which had previously been suspended without any notice. This eventually forced developers of those third-party apps to discontinue services and give refunds to their subscribers.
4. Paid access to Twitter API
On 2 February, Twitter announced that people would need to pay for an API access within a week. The plan was delayed to 13 February, before being postponed once again without a new date being provided.
People have been using Twitter’s API for free, including to analyse conversations occurring on the platform. This has resulted in more than 17,500 academic papers since 2020. Twitter initially said that basic access to its API would cost $100 a month, but according to documentation seen by WIRED, the cheapest API package with access to 50 million tweets would cost $42,000 a month, making it hard for academics to afford it. This is part of Musk’s plan to boost Twitter’s revenues.
5. Outages
As only one engineer has been assigned to work on the paid API project, Twitter has experienced a number of outages. There have been at least six outages this year alone, with the latest on 6 March. Users subsequently saw broken links and timeline, were unable to use TweetDeck and prohibited from following other accounts.