Why does my Twitter have a dog? When Elon Musk took over Twitter, he said he wanted to protect its place as a “digital town square,” where ideas from all corners of the internet could flourish. But soon, if you want your voice to really be heard in the town square, you’ll need to pay.
Musk tweeted that, starting April 15, Twitter will only recommend content from paid accounts in the For You feed, the first screen users see when they open the app. It’s just one of several seemingly random changes Musk has been making to Twitter’s core user experience without explanation. He changed the Twitter homepage’s icon from its classic blue bird logo to “doge” — the cartoonish Shiba Inu dog meme linked to the cryptocurrency dogecoin — and for some users, the app started seemingly inserting tweets from accounts people didn’t follow into the their Following feed.
Why does my Twitter have a dog?
The Twitter logo has been changed to a Shiba Inu in the latest attention-grabbing antics of the platform’s owner Elon Musk
The Twitter logo was changed from its signature blue bird to a dog icon last night — and all but the terminally online may be wondering why.
This dog graphic is the logo for dogecoin, a cryptocurrency Twitter owner Elon Musk has publicly supported in the past.
Just after the logo was changed on April 3, Musk posted an old conversation thread with account WCBChairmain from March 2022. Exactly what had just happened was suggested in the thread — that Musk should buy Twitter and change its icon to the dogecoin dog.
Some users have concluded this was an April fool’s joke that missed the actual day, due to a lack of technical staff at Twitter.
In February, Musk reportedly fired a top Twitter engineer over the diminishing engagement of his own account. This is one of many stories about fired staff and redundancies since Musk acquired the platform in October 2022.
Why is the Twitter logo a dog?
The logo switch has seen a roughly 30 per cent leap in the value of dogecoin. In 2022, Musk was sued for $258 billion (£207bn) by a crypto investor in New York for inflating the price of the cryptocurrency, under the premise that it was a pyramid scheme. This is an illegal business model that recruits members via a promise of payments or services for enrolling others into the scheme, rather than supplying investments or sale of products.
On April 1, Musk asked a US judge to drop the case, saying: “There is nothing unlawful about tweeting words of support for, or funny pictures about, a legitimate cryptocurrency that continues to hold a market cap of nearly $10 billion. (£8bn).”
Here is the real context for the logo swap, then. As part of his claim that the 2022 lawsuit was spurious, Musk has engaged in the same sort of behaviour this was about in the first place — but on a grander scale.
The dog of the dogecoin graphic is a Shiba Inu and the subject of an internet meme established in 2010-2013. Dogecoin was created as a joke at the height of the meme’s relevancy in 2013 by Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer, software engineers at IBM and Adobe.
Palmer has said in interviews and on Twitter that he believed cryptocurrency to be a “get rich quick” scheme.
“I believe that cryptocurrency is an inherently right-wing, hyper-capitalistic technology built primarily to amplify the wealth of its proponents through a combination of tax avoidance, diminished regulatory oversight and artificially enforced scarcity,” Palmer wrote on Twitter in 2021.
Why Has Elon Musk Changed the Twitter Bird Logo to a Dog? An Explainer
If you’ve been on the ol’ bird site recently – and maybe you haven’t, as Twitter users have dropped 9 per cent since Elon Musk took over – you’ll have noticed that up in the top left corner, the logo has been less bird and more… dog.
So what’s going on? Is it a brave new Woofer rebrand, to shake off all the bad press Musk has managed to build over the past few months? Are birds too woke now? Or is it just a case of Musk making himself laugh? Somewhat predictably, it’s the latter.
The dog in question is a Shiba Inu breed, and also the logo for Dogecoin, the blockchain and crypto currency first created by internet jokesters Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer as a laugh at Bitcoin, in 2013. Surprisingly, Dogecoin went on to become an actual crypto currency, at one point becoming the seventh largest electronic currency in the world, as well as reaching a market capitalisation of over $85 billion in 2021.
Dogecoin – pronounced “Doje”, btw – has been a bit of an obsession with Musk for years, with him bigging up the crypto online (“One word: Doge”, “Dogecoin is the people’s crypto”), as well as tweeting hil-a-rious memes like this one:
Even on Musk’s weird Saturday Night Live stint in August 2022, he mentioned the currency, leading it to then drop by almost 30 per cent. But it spiked several other times when he tweeted about it, or said that Tesla would accept Dogecoin for sales of Tesla merch.
However, there was a $258 billion (!) lawsuit filed against Musk in June 2022 accusing him of racketeering by promoting Dogecoin. What’s interesting is the timing of this; last Friday, March 31, Musk’s legal team filed a motion to have the lawsuit dismissed, so some are suggesting that the logo switcheroo on Monday is just an act of trolling on Musk’s part.
Also, when the Doge popped up on Monday, Musk retweeted a Twitter convo he’d had with a user back in March 2022, when he bought the social media company for $44 billion: “Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy. What should be done?” A user called @WSBChairman had responded: “just buy twitter… and change the bird logo to a doge”, to which Musk said: “Haha that would [be] sickkk.”
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