Test Your Wits: The Ultimate Twitter/X Quiz!

On March 27, 2024, Elon Musk made a strategic move by awarding free blue checkmarks to users with more than 2,500 verified subscriber followers, granting them Premium features, and to those with over 5,000, providing Premium+ features at no cost. The blue checkmark, once a symbol of paid subscription, now also nods to users who wield considerable influence in the X sphere, all without opening their digital wallets.

Mayor Anne Hidalgo announced on Nov. 27, 2023, that she was quitting X, formerly known as Twitter. She criticized the platform for devolving into a source of disinformation, hatred, anti-Semitism, and racism, heightening tensions and conflicts in society. Or, as she put it, a ‘global sewer’ destroying democracies. Several major advertisers paused their campaigns on X due to similar concerns about the platform. Hidalgo’s stance may be rooted in the criticism she received for a partially taxpayer-funded trip to Tahiti. This trip was intended to view a 2024 Olympics surfing site, but it was also noted that she visited her daughter, who lives there.

In a Sept. 18, 2023, live-streamed conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Elon Musk spilled some beans about Twitter, now known as “X”. Among the tidbits, he mentioned that X has 550 million monthly users. Musk suggested introducing a “small monthly payment” for X users during the same chat. Why, you ask? To combat those pesky “vast armies of bots.”

On July 1, 2023, Twitter implemented this revised policy to discourage “extreme levels” of data scraping and system manipulation. Verified accounts were limited to reading 6,000 posts daily, while unverified accounts were restricted to 600 posts daily. This decision led to a digital uproar, with the hashtag #TwitterDown trending in some parts of the world. Not missing a beat, Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, saw this as an opportunity to announce their new Threads app.

George Soros. Photo: Niccolò Caranti, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

George Soros, a Holocaust-surviving Jewish-born investor, and philanthropist, is often the target of far-right, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. According to a regulatory filing, Soros Fund Management LLC sold all of its 2.5 million shares of Tesla Inc. in the first quarter of 2023. It also bought shares of Lucid Motors Inc., a competitor in the electric vehicle market. This prompted Musk to tweet on May 16, 2023: “Soros is a traitor to humanity and a threat to our planet,” comparing him to the X-Men’s civilization-crushing Magneto.

On May 12, 2023, Twitter announced that it would limit access to some tweets and accounts in Turkey without specifying which ones or why. The company said it complied with the legal process and tried to keep Twitter available in Turkey. The decision sparked controversy and criticism from some observers who accused Twitter CEO Elon Musk of censoring Erdogan’s opponents and betraying his free speech principles. The content restriction came ahead of Turkey’s May 14, 2023, presidential election. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan faced a close race against opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu. Both sides dispute the election results, and Turkey remains in a state of political uncertainty.

Linda Yaccarino, previously the head of advertising and partnerships for NBCUniversal, was confirmed as the new CEO of Twitter on May 12, 2023. She was appointed by Elon Musk, who bought the platform last year for $44 billion. She will focus on business operations while Musk works on product design and technology. Yaccarino is one of the rare female chief executives in technology. She has often said she was the only woman at the table and faced bias incidents in her career.

Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter on Oct. 28, 2022, led to a 500% increase in the use of the N-word to demean Black people on the platform within just 12 hours, according to the National Contagion Research Institute, a disinformation tracking agency. Users were encouraged to amplify derogatory slurs on Twitter in several posts on the 4chan fringe message board website.

Is Trump returning to Twitter?

As of Nov. 2, 2022, Elon Musk announced Twitter would only allow people banned from its site to return once it sets up procedures on how to do so. That includes the former President, despite a fake meme stating otherwise.

Elon Musk, owner of X, formerly known as Twitter, and part-time digital drama king, pointed fingers at the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for allegedly trying to “strangle” the platform. This is after ADL’s Director, Jonathan Greenblatt, tweeted on Aug. 31, 2023, about a “productive conversation” with X’s CEO, Linda Yaccarino, about addressing the platform’s hate speech. The post was met with backlash by white supremacists, leading to the trending hashtag #BanTheADL. And during this storm, Musk chose to voice his choked-up sentiments about the ADL with a lawsuit.

Following Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, the social platform made a single-sentence update to its policies: “Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter will no longer enforce the COVID-19 misleading information policy.”