Twitter is dead

A few days ago, Twitter started requiring people to be logged in to view tweets: not to post tweets, simply to see them at all. This requires you to do two things:

• you must have an account on Twitter which means that Twitter know things about who you are;
• you must be logged in to that account which means that Twitter know things about exactly which tweets you are viewing;

Obviously such information will be used to profile you and, in the best case, to force advertising down your throat. It could also, and we must assume will also, be weaponized against you in far more sinister ways. Nobody thinking very hard about the possibilities is going to want to be logged into Twitter all the time, or even to have a Twitter account.

Twitter is also limiting the number of tweets even people who are logged in can see.

Elon Musk has just built a wall around the rotting remains of the garden he bought. Perhaps he will take it down, but the next time he has a little tantrum he will build it again: Twitter is in the hands of a person with the personality of a small, spoilt, child.

For a long time many people – politicians, scientists, and, really, almost everyone – have treated Twitter as a public space: a place where you could provide snippets of information which was available to the general public, for free. Reputable newspapers have published online articles with tweets embedded in them many, many times. Emergency services have used Twitter to broadcast critical safety information. This was always stupid, but it's also now over: all that information is gone.

Twitter is dead. I will not mourn it.