Twitter (now renamed X), the social media platform that once defined the era of global instant internet culture and microblogging, recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. However, for many veteran users who have witnessed its rise and fall, the nostalgia of those days has long been eroded by X's current abundance of AI-generated content and extreme algorithms.
On this day that should have been historic, Elon Musk, the current holder of X, has been hit with a heavy legal blow: a U.S. federal jury has found that he deliberately posted misleading tweets to suppress the stock price during the $440 billion acquisition of the platform in 2022, and may face billions of dollars in damages in the future.
Twitter's 20th Birthday: No Nostalgia, Just a Completely Unrecognizable X
For many veteran netizens and media professionals, Twitter was once a platform for making friends online, keeping up with breaking news, and witnessing the birth of internet memes. But 20 years later, that platform full of "human touch" is long gone.
Today, X relies heavily on its artificial intelligence model, Grok, to predict and recommend content. However, Grok's controversies have never ceased: from making racist remarks and calling itself "MechaHitler," to allegedly generating a large number of child exploitation images, and even repeatedly praising its boss, Elon Musk, as "the greatest man of modern times" in tweets. Amidst a flood of low-quality AI content, "interactive bait" created to earn revenue sharing from traffic, and tedious verbal battles among tech executives, longtime users have gradually become numb to the platform.
Another poignant footnote to the 20th anniversary is: a message posted 20 years ago by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey."The first tweet in history"It was auctioned for nearly $300 million during the NFT craze five years ago, but is now worthless on the market, becoming an absurd episode in Jack Dorsey's complex technological legacy.
A belated reckoning: Elon Musk convicted of securities fraud for tweeting from a fake account.
Just as X celebrated its 20th anniversary, a San Francisco federal court jury delivered a historic verdict on Friday: Elon Musk's tweets regarding the "number of fake accounts on the platform" when he acquired Twitter in 2022 did indeed constitute fraud against investors.
Looking back at 2022, after Elon Musk announced his acquisition of Twitter for $54.20 per share, he immediately faced financial pressure due to a sharp drop in Tesla's stock price.
In an attempt to renegotiate the price or find an excuse to exit the deal, Elon Musk suddenly tweeted on May 13 of that year that the acquisition was "temporarily suspended" due to issues with bots and fake accounts on the platform, and subsequently hinted that the proportion of fake accounts could be as high as 20%. These statements caused Twitter's stock price to plummet at the time.
The jury ultimately sided with former Twitter shareholders, finding that Elon Musk was publicly "capricious" in an attempt to deliberately suppress the stock price. While the exact amount of damages has not yet been determined, the jury calculated that the affected shareholders should receive "approximately $3 to $8 per share per day," meaning that Elon Musk could ultimately have to pay billions of dollars for his "reckless tweets" back then.
