Doomsday averted

Time for a bit of humility among those prematurely celebrating Twitter’s demise in a since deleted tweet from Mike Bird:

It’s been 12 weeks since ‘let that sink in’, nine weeks since the mass hysteria about Twitter imminently shutting down, and the only obvious sign that there’s been any change in the company’s ownership and management on a day to day basis is paid verification.

I can’t see anything factually wrong, so I’ll still quote it.

This should serve as a start reminder to those engaged in agenda-driven narratives to be a bit more careful about simply believing what they want to be true.

It looks like Musk was right about Twitter being way over-staffed. It’s too early to tell whether that’s a case of a stopped clocked being right or whether he may have been onto something more.

Much like the decontextualized disaster driven journalism that’s become a constant b-roll looping the background, these hype driven stories get hyped out of all proportion because they fit a pre-existing worldview, long before they can be verified. And I haven’t see any of the major tech news outlets printing retractions or stories along the lines of “Gee, we got that one wrong, here’s what we’ve learned and how we’re changing our approach so we don’t do that again.”