Elon Musk has replaced Twitter’s Blue Bird logo with that of Doge, the Shiba Inu beloved by many as a classic internet meme.
On Monday afternoon, users logged onto Twitter on their computers to discover that the familiar Blue Bird logo, which sat above the home icon on the left-hand side of the page, was replaced with a familar image of the dog known to the internet as Doge.
BREAKING: It appears as if @ElonMusk has replaced the Twitter logo with an image of Doge. pic.twitter.com/IfjO4WhDmG
— ALX 🇺🇸 (@alx) April 3, 2023
Twitter Icon is now Doge!!!👇
Say Good Bye to the Bird🐥 pic.twitter.com/QTBuzCyW0T— Ripster (@ripster47) April 3, 2023
The Twitter Logo has been replaced with the Doge Meme@ElonMusk is a Master Troll 🤣 pic.twitter.com/sUVmVCGbfT
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) April 3, 2023
The dog, known as Kabosu, lives with her owner Atsuke Sato, in Japan, and became a meme in 2013 after the image went viral.
Doge was voted “Meme of the Decade” in 2019 by a survey of over 3,000 people conducted by The Tab.
After the logo change spread around Twitter, which was speculated to be a late April Fool’s joke, Musk reposted some tweets from last year, where one Twitter user encouraged him to buy the Big Tech site, and change Twitter’s Blue Bird logo to Doge. It is unclear whether this will be a permanent change.
As promised pic.twitter.com/Jc1TnAqxAV
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 3, 2023
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 3, 2023
While the change in Twitter’s logo was taken by some as just a reference to a classic internet meme, the specific cartoon version of Doge posted to the site is the logo of Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency that Musk has tweeted about in the past.
After the logo was replaced, Dogecoin surged more than 30% in the markets. Musk is currently facing a $258 billion racketeering lawsuit for his promotion of Dogecoin, which investors claimed amounted to a pyramid scheme. Musk’s lawyers called the accusations a “fanciful work of fiction,” arguing he only posted “innocuous and silly tweets” about the currency.
Twitter replaces app icon with $doge icon, signaling it could be implementing doge for payments. #DOGE #Bitcoin
— Dylan K (@MightyDylanK) April 3, 2023
The guy who meme'd dogecoin into having any semblance of value deciding to run a prank where he turns the icon for one of the world's biggest social media platforms into the doge and increasing its value isn't exactly, but does ~feel~ like insider trading / market manipulation. pic.twitter.com/E8D3LWcBCz
— Fred Wood (@thatsmytrunks) April 3, 2023
However, the move wasn’t without its drawbacks. At around the same time as the Doge logo was implemented, the Following feed on desktop browsers, which shows a chronological list of tweets from people you follow, no longer showed when a tweet was being retweeted, instead looking as if random accounts were being implemented into the feed.
The latest Twitter update that changed the Twitter logo to doge also broke retweets by removing the indicator of who retweeted them so now the Following twitter feed looks like it's full of random accounts.
Good job. pic.twitter.com/sAJBKs70W6
— DatNoFact ↗ (@datnofact) April 3, 2023
What the hell is up with my Following feed? I'm getting posts from hours or days ago, and others from people I don't even follow, mixed in with the latest posts. What gives @elonmusk??? pic.twitter.com/aesemgCSOq
— Jack Hadfield 🇬🇧 (@JackHadders) April 3, 2023
