Saturday Night Live found fertile ground for humour in the unfolding chaos at Twitter in this week’s episode, lampooning the suggestion that some banned accounts would be reinstated under the leadership of Elon Musk.
Mr Musk completed his $44bn acquisition of the social media platform last week. He has since laid off a huge proportion of the staff, begun overturning the blue-check verification system, and announced the formation of a panel to deal with content moderation.
The NBC comedy sketch show focused on the idea of people with banned accounts appealing to the first Content Moderation Council meeting to have their presence on the network reinstated — including former president Donald Trump.
Cast members Kenan Thompson and Chloe Fineman play “the only two Twitter employees who haven’t been laid off” and are charged with deciding if suspended accounts will be let back on.
Those coming before the panel to plead their cases included Cecily Strong playing a woman ranting about “the Covid PLANdemic” saying it was “created by Big Pharma to silence me”; and guest host Amy Schumer who played a bot trying to ensnare Thompson by enticing him to her website “www.sexpalace.bitcoinscam.iraq” while asking for his social security number.
The highlight of the sketch was former president Mr Trump coming before the panel to ask for his account back, having been permanently banned in the aftermath of the January 6 Capitol riot in early 2021 during the final days of his presidency.
Played by James Austin Johnson, who has been widely praised for his mimicry of the former president’s rambling speech patterns, Mr Trump was asked by Ms Fineman why he would want to come back to Twitter after setting up his own social media network, Truth Social.
“Yes, we’ve all moved to Truth Social, and we love Truth Social. It’s very great,” Mr Johnson’s Trump said. “And in many ways, also terrible. It’s very bad. Very, very bad. It’s a little buggy in terms of making the phone screen crack, and the automatically draining of the Venmo.”
Mr Johnson’s Trump asked to be let back on Twitter, saying he would “do another covfefe”, referencing a famous typo in a late night presidential tweet that went viral.
He then promised that he wouldn’t do anything bad if he was let back on the platform, “except maybe… coup”.
Ms Fineman and Mr Thompson both agreed to let the former president back on, saying: “Might as well roll the dice, right?”
Their characters were both then laid off via a tweet from Mr Musk.
“Yay! We’re finally free!” Ms Fineman exclaimed.
