All of it was potentially far too useful. O’Brien toyed with the idea of toothbrushes, sneakers and just about any body part you can think of. “So then I thought, what if I went the other way and did something completely bland as a joke? What’s the dumbest thing that you could see on a person that tells you the least about that person? What part of someone contains the least information about their personality?” “I was like, well, what if I did a joke dirty sex thing - and then I realized that’s pretty much the same as doing a genuine dirty sex thing,” O’Brien said. This never-ending resurfacing of the thread led O’Brien to start thinking about what version 2.0 might look like. there are a wide range of voices that gay guys can have and I wanted to know who sounded like what.”Įventually the responses died down, but O’Brien said he continues to get an occasional burst of notifications when someone finds the thread for the first time and starts liking them. Especially - I don’t know if it’s gay culture or not - but. “I’m interacting with all these people that I’ve never met and probably will never meet, and I just didn’t know what anybody sounded like,” O’Brien told Mic. Some just rambled about whatever they were doing that day, but it was all in service of this digital approximation of a real-life hangout for people who tweet back and forth constantly.
Others performed a monologue from a movie. Some people posted videos of themselves telling a funny story. Over the course of a few days, dozens and dozens of people posted videos in response to O’Brien’s original tweet. “Post a video of your voice so we can all hear each other. “Welcome to the gay Twitter voice thread,” O’Brien wrote. And that’s why, in May, John “Jack” O’Brien, a writer based in Los Angeles, decided to start the gay Twitter voice thread. It’s a community whose members interact as though they’re lifelong friends, and yet the vast majority of them will likely never meet the people with whom they spend so much time swapping Drag Race GIFs and hyperbolically geeking out over Laura Dern’s purple Star Wars hair, for example. But when you’ve reached gay Twitter, you know it. Really, most of us spend our time straddling both worlds - with one foot in Anthony Oliveira’s feed and another snarkily responding to whatever entirely harmless thing Neil deGrasse Tyson just ruined. There’s no initiation fee and you never get an invitation or an official gay Twitter membership card. It’s hard to point to the exact moment you’ve escaped the amorphous atmosphere protecting normie Twitter and when you’ve officially begun free-floating in the cold, lawless void of gay Twitter. And, like outer space, its exact bounds aren’t really clear. "The President has long talked about his concerns about the power of social media platforms, including Twitter and others, to spread misinformation.Gay Twitter - a slang term describing a loose community of queer men who interact regularly on Twitter - is a messy, beautiful place. "Our concerns are not new," said White House spokesperson Jen Psaki, adding that platforms need to be held accountable. The White House declined to comment on the deal, however, it said US President Joe Biden had long been concerned about the power of social media platforms. The deal ends Twitter's run as a public company, since its 2013 initial public offering. Twitter's shares were up about 6 per cent after the news. Twitter said the deal was expected to close some time this year and was subject to the approval of Twitter stockholders and regulators. The 11-member board includes Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey, who had been planning to step down from the board in May. Twitter said the transaction was unanimously approved by its board of directors. Mr Musk said last week that he had lined up $US46.5 billion ($64.7 billion) in financing. With initial concerns of its own about the deal, Twitter had enacted an anti-takeover measure known as a poison pill that could make a takeover attempt prohibitively expensive.īut the board decided to negotiate after Musk updated his proposal last week to show he had secured financing, according to The Wall Street Journal. The deal was cemented roughly two weeks after the billionaire first revealed a 9 per cent stake in the platform. Mr Musk is a prolific tweeter with a following that rivals several pop stars in the ranks of the most popular accounts.