While I agree, no one should be behind this shit company, it's quite a standard thing to do.
Literally every social media platform has the ability to reset a users username so they can free it up. It happens all the time.
Are you famous enough? Cool, contact any company about taking over the username "Jake" and they'll give you it. Doesn't matter that the other dudes name is Jake. Doesn't matter they had it first. Doesn't matter that it isn't a trademarked name.
It's not really that shitty in context with Musk's everyday doings. I'm honestly not surprised at all.
If this was the worst of him, I'd be able to handle it (even though it indeed is a shitty thing to do and devalues Twitter handles [which is imo actually a good thing]).
Speaking of his everyday doings. Has anyone investigated all those underage illegal migrant children he has in his bathroom shower? Or was that just a rumor started on "the app formerly known as twitter"?
Yep, totally not surprising in the least. Imagine if you'd built up a whole following around one handle and poof, it's just gone. I think Musk got threatened by how stupid Huffman was being with Reddit and decided that the only way to be more stupid was to relabel the already flailing company.
Not defending the thin-skinned rich kid but the tweeter formerly known as @X didn't lose anything apart from the name. Anyone can change their @name on Twitter and keep the rest of the account intact. Twitter changed his @name so that they could change their @name. Nothing else changed on either account.
What some people don't realize it's that those usernames besides from being unique are very valuable, at the point that when someone won't sell it they get harassed until they do
Darknet Diaries did an interview with someone who was harassed for an Instagram handle and while the harassment for him was low stakes, it was high annoyance and high anxiety inducing.
Nobody is debating that it's legal. They're within their rights but it's unethical and extremely worrying since Elon's stated goal is to make X the everything app for communication, payments, and whatever else. The fact that he's more than happy to abuse his power just because he can makes the prospect of X growing horrifying. It would be an app where they own you and you own nothing.
I just see as a sign it's never gonna work. Not under Elon, not X. He's a megalomaniac idiot...
And I don't see how it's "unethical" either. It's annoying, rude, stupid, ridiculous, shitty, sure. But unethical? They didn't promise anything, they even gave some compensation even though they didn't need to, right? Ethics isn't even objective so I just don't think that's remotely meaningful, what ethical boundary are they overstepping? "To forcibly change someone's social media handle is unethical"?
IDK, just don't use Twitter!! I guess I just don't see this as a big issue because I think Twitter is dumb, I suppose if you use the app a lot... IDK.