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.
