If Elon Musk is right about Twitter being crucial to the future of civilisation, then things are looking bleak for us all. Outages are on the rise, advertising revenues have plunged, and a company that had a 7,500-strong workforce just four months ago now employs just 2,000, after yet another round of job cuts.
When Musk took over the social media platform back in October, the sometimes-richest person in the world said he was doing so not to make money, but to “try to help humanity”. He was determined to make Twitter better, he said, because it was “important to the future of civilisation to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner”.
I haven’t seen Musk take part in many serious debates of late — healthy or otherwise — though I have seen him posting a whole load of third-rate memes and re-sharing his own bad gags. I do wonder, also, whether someone who is reported to have got 80 engineers to tweak the algorithm so his tweets would be more visible than those of the US president is really the person who will manage to save Twitter and (according to him) the rest of us.