How to Succeed on Elon Musk’s Twitter

The rules aren’t hard. Just immoral.

Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter has irrefutably transformed the platform, sweeping in some positive changes but far more negative ones. While Twitter has always been ruled by The Algorithm™, the effect is noticeably more prominent now, and the impact is demonstrably more corrosive. The Algorithm™ knows what it likes, and if you feed it its preferred diet of divisive content, conspiracy theories, disputes, and outlandish claims, it will reward you mightily. If, however, you fail to produce enough inciting content or don’t participate in enough petty arguments and partisan battles, it will unleash harsh punishment in the form of suppressing your tweets so no one sees them. It’s almost like some kind of social media-based Pavlovian conditioning program designed to train you to produce the worst type of content on the internet by offering immediate, dopamine-rich rewards for those who do, and ensuring deprivation for everyone else.

So how do you succeed on Elon Musk’s Twitter? Well, you must please The Algorithm™. And how do you do that? Really, it’s quite simple — as long as you don’t mind compromising your morals and dignity in the process. Here’s a step-by-step guide*:

1. Find your tribe. They’re the ones who repeat the same talking points as you. It doesn’t matter who they are; it doesn’t even matter if they’re human. Just look for the people saying the same stuff as you, and start following as many of them as possible. Get in their replies, retweet them, do whatever it takes. Get noticed by displaying your commitment to the prescribed talking points. These are your allies.

2. Identify those who express opposing views. Or even neutral views. Basically, anyone who isn’t saying exactly what you’re saying. These are your enemies.

3. Start fights with people. It doesn’t matter who they are. It doesn’t even really matter what they’re saying. Just start a fight and dig in. Never consider whether you might be in the wrong; that’s how you become more tolerant and insightful, not how you win a fight on the internet. The Algorithm™ doesn’t care about things like tolerance and insight. It cares about winning. And what are you here for? That’s right — you’re here to win. So close that mind and don’t let new information in.

4. Speak for other people. Just pick a tweet from one of your identified enemies and quote-tweet it with a summary — except don’t actually tell people what their tweet says. Give it the most bad-faith read possible. If needed, just make something up. If someone says they like kittens, quote-tweet them and tell your followers “THIS GUY IS CALLING FOR A GENOCIDE OF DOGS.” Then go on a 10-tweet rant about how much they hate dogs and want them to die so kittens can have more room to wander freely. Who cares if it’s not true? Your followers probably won’t even read their tweets anyway — they’ll just read your summary and believe you.

5. Dig through people’s old tweets. Take Dog Genocide Guy as an example. Does he have an old tweet about getting bitten by a dog? Has he ever complained about a loud dog barking early in the morning? A shedding dog? A dog using his lawn as a bathroom? Well, that’s premeditation. Not really, but you can say it is. Again, your followers won’t really look at their tweet; they’ll just read your summary and assume you’re providing a basically accurate depiction. Take advantage of this. If your followers really cared about truth, they could always read the underlying tweets, so it’s kind of their fault anyway.

6. Don’t be afraid to stitch together unrelated tweets to get a good narrative. While you’re digging through the old tweets, let’s say you find 3 or 4 tweets on a seemingly related topic from the last 15 years. Don’t be afraid to stitch them together into a cohesive narrative even though there might be years between each of the tweets. For example, maybe Dog Genocide Guy tweeted one year about his neighbor’s dog being loud and tearing up the yard. Then maybe a few years later he tweeted about his neighbor’s dog dying. And then a few years later, maybe he tweeted a picture of his kitten in the yard. Well, stitch them together and you’ve got a narrative about a guy whose kitten suddenly took over the yard when the neighbor’s dog unexpectedly died after Dog Genocide Guy was complaining about it. Suspicious, right? Not really, but you can make it seem like it is! Evidence collages like this are a great way to make it look like you have receipts when all you really have is a bunch of random bursts of text that you are assigning meaning to.

7. Prepare for the counterattack. When the person you’re speaking for tries to speak for themself, be ready to use their words against them. If Dog Genocide Guy denies his desire for a genocide of dogs, accuse him of gaslighting. If he calls you insane, say he’s an ableist. And so on.

8. Always go for the most extreme position. The Algorithm™ loves extremism and those who espouse it. Why call someone a murderer when you can call them a genocidal psychopath? Why call someone a borderline authoritarian when you can call them a full-fledged fascist? Why accuse someone of bullying when you can accuse them of a hate crime? Why say COVID might have come from a lab when you can say it was a Chinese bioweapon manufactured to kill Americans? Never let anyone be more extreme than you. This is how you lose.

9. Join in other people’s fights. Arguments are so much easier to win when it’s you and 30 of your “allies” going against a common enemy. You don’t even have to give the enemy time to respond. It’s easier that way, actually, because then you don’t have to worry about them making a point you can’t refute. This works best if you coordinate tweets in a private group to maximize effectiveness. Think shock and awe, the Twitter Edition. The Algorithm™ will love the network effects that result from this.

10. Jump on trending topics. It doesn’t matter if you care about the topic or have anything insightful or useful to say. Just make sure your tweets appear at the top of trending pages. The Algorithm™ loves trends more than a teenage girl does. This works even better if you can focus on a few trends and nothing else. Literally forget that there’s a world outside of the three trends you choose to focus on, and tweet about these trends exclusively and obsessively. Then ride the engagement train that follows.

So there you have it — ten simple steps to get ahead on Elon Musk’s Twitter, a social media platform that, ironically, rewards by the most toxic antisocial behavior on the website. If you can part with your connection to reality and things like truth and self-respect, then you, too, can succeed on Twitter.

*this guide is obviously satirical and every word is dripping with sarcasm. Don’t follow this advice unless you want to join the worst people on the internet in sacrificing your integrity for clicks.