Twitter has always been in the doom-scrolling business, and business is booming.

Gonzalo Fuentes / Reuters / Redux

Let’s face it, Twitter isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. The platform is a lot like a cockroach. It is ugly, skittering, repulsive, and incredibly difficult—despite many efforts—to kill. Elon Musk purchased the network in late 2022, treated its power users with disdain, haphazardly fired much of its workforce, alienated its advertisers, insisted on calling it X, and turned it into a vehicle for an edgelordian political project. People left in droves. And yet somehow, at this moment in 2024, X has the juice.

It’s still a rat’s nest of reckless speculation, angry partisans, and toxicity, but it’s also alive in a way that’s hard to quantify. Joe Biden’s shocking performance at the presidential debate in late June set my timeline ablaze in a way it hadn’t been since 2021. When a gunman shot at Donald Trump eight days ago, the platform did what it does best, offering a mix of conspiracy theorizing, up-to-the second hard-news reporting, and, perhaps most crucial, a notion of communal spectating (which, despite the awfulness, is genuinely addictive). The past three weeks have been extraordinarily chaotic, full of the kind of infighting, violence, and spectacle that X was built to help document and even fuel. All of that culminated this afternoon when Biden announced that he was withdrawing from the presidential race with a series of posts on the platform. X has always been in the doomscrolling business, and business is booming.

If you step back, though, you may notice how awkward this situation is: Joe Biden chose to make one of the biggest announcements in presidential history on a social-media site owned and operated by one of his opponent’s biggest donors and most vocal supporters. Musk reacted to the news by posting about how his “smartest friends” are voting for Trump and by compulsively replying “Trump/Vance LFG!!” to people on X.