SPACE Karen – that’s Elon Musk to the analogue hold-outs among you – has decided that from now on you’ll be able to like whatever you want on Twitter without anybody knowing you liked it. Just a couple of days after the new edict kicked in, the Tesla boss was claiming a huge upsurge in likes across the platform.
It's entirely fitting, I suppose, since conflict and fury are the trademarks of social media, that a word such as ‘like’ can be turned on its head to the extent that it’s just as often – or perhaps more often – a negative rather than a positive thing. Because if you’re part of the gang that Musk has made this change for, he’s not hiding your Twitter preferences because you keep liking pictures of kittens fast asleep in an Easter basket with ducklings, or because you keep liking haikus about world peace and the climate emergency – he wants to hide them because you’re a horrible bastard. And it’s highly likely that you’re a far-right horrible bastard.
Being a US-based platform, Twitter always leaned to the right, but after Musk purchased it in 2022 for $44 billion, he immediately began the task of turning it into a weapon against those infected with what he calls “the woke mind virus” – ie, anyone who doesn’t agree that trans people should be hanged from lampposts with piano wire or that Gary Lineker is a Sharia sleeper.
Musk renamed the platform X last year because that name had more of a dystopian sci-fi Armageddon series feel about it than a Disneyesque picture of a small blue bird. And personally, I’m convinced he was mightily impressed by the Z the Russians put on their tanks in Ukraine. I’ve kept calling it Twitter – a pathetic protest which is about as effective as that new 4X4 of Musk’s which stops working when it gets water on its tyres.
But whatever its name, in every corner of the global platform there are people, right across the social spectrum, from hedge managers to shelf stackers, simply bursting to like things they see.
They punch the air and hiss “Yessssss” when they see a tweet blaming the world’s problems on “n***ers”, “jungle bunnies”, “towelheads”, “P***s”, “lady boys” and “poofs”. They slap the desk and whoop their vindication when someone points out that Dr Anthony Fauci’s Covid advice killed more people than Adolf Hitler. Chemtrails are making us all sterile? Hell, yeah! Michelle Obama is a man? Of course he is. The Democratic party is a demonic cult which kidnaps children and drinks their blood to stay young? Obvs. Jews are out to replace… well… just about everybody, really? Heck, didn't Trump tell us good people believe that?
The trouble is, there’s a decent chance that if you do like tweets like that it’s likely to come to people’s attention. And because there are still people in the workplace who don’t think we’ve all got Bill Gates microchips in our arms and IQ is not dependent on colour, you’re likely to get into trouble. In fact, there’s more than a decent chance you’ll get fired. Which means that while Twitter is awash with whackjob far-right insanity, there’s still plenty of room for more. And when there’s no danger of you losing your job because nobody knows what you’re liking any more, let’s be honest here, you’re going to go let loose your Mussolini.
Important change: your likes are now private https://t.co/acUL8HqjUJ
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 12, 2024
He gets the name of an inventor, does Musk, even though he hasn’t, ah, invented anything. His three signature businesses – PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX – are all, to use a Blue Peterism, something somebody else made earlier. But this new Acme Hater Hider is all his own work and if the march of fascism across the world speeds up thanks to that invention, it could make him more famous and more rich than any card reader, car or space ship.
A rampant Reform UK party has just overtaken the Tories in the polls, despite a slew of its candidates being found out by their Twitter history. For parties like Reform (actually it’s a company owned by leader Nigel Farage), the new Twitter rule comes as a godsend with three weeks of the general election remaining.
The party/company had come to a political arrangement with the TUV before Farage decided that his two Trump-lovin’ bezzies, Sammy Wilson and Ian Paisley, meant more to him – and under the Wrightbus the TUV went.
Nil desperandum, though. The Reform UK logo remains on the TUV website so the party can continue to bathe in the reflected glory of the following Reform UK classics.
*Advisory: Constituency candidates are changing daily thanks to woke touts.
Nigel Farage (leader): “Women who take maternity leave are “worth less” than male employees. Asked to explain that claim he said: “Maybe it’s because I’ve got so many women pregnant over the years that I have a different view.”
Ben Habib (deputy leader): “Absolutely.” (Asked if he’d leave immigrants to drown in the channel.)
Ian Gribbin (Bexhill/Battle): Vladimir Putin fan who says Britain would today be a “better place” if it had “taken up Hitler on his offer of neutrality”;. He t thinks women are the “sponging gender” who should be “deprived of health care”.
Robert Lomas (Barnsley North): Black people have it “in their DNA to lie” and act like “savages”.
Mark Burca (Kensington/Bayswater): “Was Ghislaine doing the 17-year-old a favour?” (Speaking after Maxwell was jailed for the sex trafficking of minors.)
Hugo Miller (Horsham): Black people are “jungle bunnies” and “baboons”.
Andrea Whitehead (Leeds West/Pudsey): Sadiq Khan is an “undercover Jihadist”. Chemtrail enthusiast (the conspiracy theory that claims passenger jet vapour trails are in fact toxic chemicals used to neuter humans or control them psychologically).
Chris Farmer (Gloucester): Believes the climate crisis was invented to “justify the creation of dictatorships” and anyone who believes CO2 is a pollutant is “confused, wrong or lying”.
Craig Birtwhistle (Worsley/Eccles): Wants a complete ban on the Muslim faith. “Let them leave if they don’t like it.”
Stevie Bates (Ayrshire Central): Currently flogging his book about his 10 years as a drug smuggler, which he's dedicated to “the prostitutes and sex workers of the world”.
Lucian Fernando (Hastings & Rye): Joined Reform UK after being expelled for a slew of traffic offences, including drink driving.
Augustine Obodo (Bicester/Woodstock): Passionate supporter of the man he calls “Daddy Trump” and also a supporter of QANon,which claims that Democrats kidnap babies to harvest their blood.
Rowland O’Connor (North Cornwall): Covid conspiracy enthusiast, sharing claims that the vaccine has killed 17 million people and another that we are all under the influence of “military grade hypnosis”.
Garry Sutherland (Exmouth/Exeter East): Banned from keeping animals for two years after being found guilty of abusing a dog.
Amelia Randall (Herne Bay/Sandwich): Self-described ‘psychic’ who sold ‘spells’ online for £200.
Yvette Maxwell Darkes (Swindon North): Believes the convicted mortgage fraudster Stephen ‘Tommy Robinson’ Yaxley-Lennon has “very good things to say” and “says things that most people think”. Adds: “I actually like him.”
Trevor Lloyd Jones (Aldershot): Shared the conspiracy theory that elderly people in care homes didn’t die of Covid, but were killed by Health Secretary Matt Hancock with the drug midazolam.
Lynn Murphy (Easington): Believes Bill Gates is “creating clouds to block out the sun” and that climate change is “make-believe”.
* 41 of Reform UK’s candidates are Facebook friends with Garry Raikes, leader of the New British Union, whose Facebook bio reads “Forward with Fascism.”
** If I 'liked' any of the above while compiling this list before Elon changed the rules, it wasn't my fault.
1. Somebody else does my socials.
2. The cat hit my arm while I was typing.
3. It was performance art.
And you can lump these excuses if you don't like them.