What Elon’s giving up: Twitter’s best moments – from Boaty McBoatface to Trump’s ban
In April, when Elon Musk announced plans to buy Twitter, the platform’s users instantly divided into two clear camps: those who thought that Musk would ruin Twitter, and those who understood that it was already pretty dreadful. Now that Musk has said he is walking away from the deal, a third group is complaining that without an injection of go-getting, Musk-style disruption the platform is doomed to irrelevancy.
Everyone needs to calm down. While Twitter does now primarily operate as a receptacle for the world’s angriest people to scream their least thought-out arguments at each other around the clock, it can still also be a force for good. Since its inception, Twitter has proved that it is brilliant at two key things: accelerating social change, and illuminating the depths of human stupidity. Here are 10 standout moments from Twitter history.
On 2 March 2014, during an otherwise interminable Oscars ceremony, host Ellen DeGeneres ploughed into the midst of the assembled A-listers and demanded a group selfie. DeGeneres immediately tweeted the resulting photograph, which quickly became the most widely retweeted in history. The selfie has subsequently dropped to fifth place (behind the announcement of Chadwick Boseman’s death, two tweets by a Japanese billionaire looking to give away his fortune and a man attempting to get a year’s supply of chicken nuggets). By photographic standards the selfie is unforgivably inept – Angelina Jolie is obscured by her own hand, Jared Leto is barely in the frame and everyone looks several million miles from their best – but in retrospect that’s all part of its charm.
When a stream of women accused Harvey Weinstein of sexual harassment and rape in 2017, Twitter quickly united. The stories about
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