Twitter users, sensing the end of an era, confess their secrets

In the chaos that followed Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, one user, thinking the platform might not be around much longer, revealed a secret from her college days. Another made a last-minute plea to crowdfund her medical bills. Another admitted she bit into whole Kit Kat bars without breaking them apart first.

In recent weeks, Twitter has laid off nearly half its employees, executives have resigned, advertisers have pulled back, and Musk has struggled to calm concerns that misinformation and hate speech might spread on the platform. Though there are no official signs that Twitter is going anywhere, users who feared Twitter might be in its final days have posted last-minute announcements and appeals. Some seemed to be mocking the platform’s troubles, while others posted like mourners at a wake, fearing a real Armageddon for a place where they have built networks, spread and read information and, sometimes, fallen in love.

“I feel bad about doing this, but Twitter is probably going down soon and this is the last chance to get this circulated,” Amber Brown, 28, a streaming producer from Los Angeles, wrote on Twitter. “Help fix my liver!” She added a link to her GoFundMe petition, on which she is asking for help to pay her medical bills.

“If Twitter implodes this is your last chance to tell me you’re in love with me so shoot your shot,” Phoebe Kimball wrote on Twitter, posting a series of pictures of herself.

“Now is your last chance to please give me a job before Twitter goes down please,” wrote Daniel Spenser, 35, a designer in the Brooklyn borough of New York City who is looking for work.

Since Musk’s takeover, some Twitter users have moved to other social media platforms, including Mastodon, which describes itself as “a viable alternative to Twitter.”

Jack Orchard, 31, a researcher in England, said that “before everyone flees,” he wanted to let his Twitter followers know that his daughter, Cherry Jo, was born. Orchard said in a message that he liked Twitter as “a place where I can be pretty unfiltered and informal, but still talking to my peers,” but that if too many of his colleagues left, “I’ll probably leave too.”

Jennifer Crawford, 49, an architect in Sydney, wrote that before Twitter “implodes” entirely, she wanted to confess something she did when she was a university student. “I once took a cask of peach cooler to a uni party and left it under the table,” she wrote, referring to the nonalcoholic fruit cocktail. “I was 18. Give me a break.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times