Yesterday, Twitter began locking visitors out of seeing tweets without logging into an account. This means that if you try to visit Stephen King’s page (or any page on Twitter) you get redirected to a sign-in prompt. If you click on a link to a specific tweet, like those from Google News, you are also prompted to sign in. Visitors cannot see any tweets without an account.

The company didn’t announce this change. It’s the latest move to try to force people to create an account to access what Elon Musk has called a ‘digital town square’ for free speech. While the platform was always more of an internet graffiti site than a town square, it was possible to get some sense of what was going on in the world by weeding through the trends. Earlier this year, Twitter locked non-account holders from searching the site or seeing the ranked trends; visitors were directed to a page with mostly promoted tweets from people who had paid for blue check marks. The platform is now more about vanity than communication.

Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, visiting the site has changed from seeing what was ‘trending’ in the world to something akin to venturing into the private bedroom of a teenage boy. Some of the promoted blue-check-mark tweets are from women on OnlyFans, a service primarily used by sex workers who share pornographic photos. Many of the other promoted tweets are from dubious influencers on various other platforms. The whole experience is a dumbed-down version of what it used to be, and there are claims from internet watchdogs that hate speech and vitriol has dramatically increased.

Long gone are the days of going to Twitter during an event like the Arab Spring and seeing raw video of the protests in the Middle East before the images were culled for the news. According to an article on Mashable, Twitter estimated in a blog post in 2015 that about “500 million people” visited the platform each month without logging in. With stagnant user growth, loss of power users, and dwindling advertising revenue since he took over the platform, Musk no doubt sees dollar signs by getting those people to create accounts. The question is, will they sign up only to watch Twitter die?

There are lots of Twitter alternatives on the horizon, from Bluesky being launched by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, to Instagram and others. OpenAI has a plugin that allows a user to ‘scrape’ information off any website — including Twitter. Anyone can now create their own trending lists and see that Twitter has largely died as a relevant platform. Do people really want to see the world through the eyes of Elon Musk or a teenage boy?

Perhaps, as an article from The New Republic suggests, Musk actually has a plan for how he is transforming Twitter. Is he creating a right-wing “news distribution and creation company” because that is where he sees the money?

Musk once tweeted that “By ‘free speech’, I simply mean that which matches the law. I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law. If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect. Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people.”

Of course, this isn’t the American definition of free speech, (and you now have to be logged in to see the tweet). It appears that part of the plan (if there is one) is to let world leaders and lawmakers ‘package’ free speech on the platform. Citizens will need to create accounts to see what they are missing, allowing themselves to be tracked across the internet. And they too can become a promoted and ‘reliable’ source if they pay for a blue check mark.

Twitter seems to have gone from an internet graffiti site with some cultural relevance to a digital playground for those willing to pay and pretend they are part of an elite few who ‘get free speech’. During that time, the platform’s value has reportedly dropped from the 44 billion dollars that Musk and other investors paid in 2022 to about 15 billion. If only someone could figure out how to end world hunger with money like that.