Twitter, a text-based social media platform that served as a digital town square, was killed by its unhinged owner Elon Musk on Sunday. I was 17 years old at the time.

The zombie Twitter, known only as X, reluctantly endures. An ugly shell of its former self, X marches on like a White Walker under the direction of a loathsome leader, a warped and disfigured platform.

A platform like X allows trolls to boost their ugly content ahead of reputable sources for a small fee, whereas Twitter was once a place where authoritative information could be found.

On X, identity verification is no longer necessary, and impersonation is only possible if you pay a subscription fee.

X is a platform for smearing and banning journalists, while elevating the most repellant and dishonest voices.

Content moderation is mostly an idea of the past on X, a platform where the rules are unclear.

It is a platform where the most important and consequential decisions can be made on a whim.

X is a platform whose infrastructure is crumbling and its most basic features are often unavailable.

There is a possibility that X resembles Twitter. The website may occupy the same location on the internet as Twitter did in the past. Make no mistake, it is not the same platform it was nine months ago when Musk took over, quickly decapitated the former leadership, and threw the company into chaos.

There is no longer a platform for that. Before it was announced to the public by way of a sudden and disorderly rebranding, it probably died some time ago.

Trump did to the Republican Party what Musk did to Twitter: he wholly remade it in his own image. With Musk, the deformed entity will have a different name, allowing the public to perhaps distinguish Twitter from what Musk has transformed it into.

Twitter’s business problems will, of course, be inherited by X. It is Musk, not the widely recognized bird logo, that has proven toxic to advertisers and users. Mark Zuckerberg and Threads pose new competition to the billionaire, making it unclear how he will eventually turn the ship around.

There is little hope, however, that Musk will be able to steer the ship out of the iceberg-ridden waters. After all, he is the captain who led the ship into them while manically laughing alongside his inner circle.