Twitter’s blue bird logo replaced with doge meme amid Musk’s $258bn Dogecoin lawsuit
Elon Musk’s antics have reached new heights with the 'doge' meme icon replacing Twitter’s blue bird in user interfaces Monday – amid an ongoing lawsuit alleging that Musk ran a pyramid scheme supporting the meme coin Dogecoin.
Twitter has updated its logo to the doge meme / Adobe Stock
Twitter users noticed Monday that the app’s iconic blue bird logo – which has long served as a home button at the top of users’ menus – had been swapped out for an image of the popular ‘doge’ meme featuring the face of a shiba inu.
The image also appears as a buffering icon when users open the site via desktop.
The cheeky dog is perhaps most well-known for serving as the face of Dogecoin, the meme coin that billionaire Twitter owner Elon Musk famously endorsed and helped catapult into success in the spring of 2021 – that is, until its historic crash in 2022, when the value of the currency tanked approximately 75%.
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The change to Twitter’s logo comes just three days after Musk petitioned a US federal court to drop a $258bn racketeering lawsuit levied against him by Dogecoin investors. Plaintiffs allege that the controversial Twitter and Tesla exec was essentially operating a pyramid scheme in support of the cryptocurrency. They say that Musk purposefully drove up the price of the token more than 36,000% over the course of two years – only to let it plummet, which resulted in billions of dollars in losses.
Filed in June of last year, the lawsuit asserts that “Musk used his pedestal as World's Richest man to operate and manipulate the Dogecoin Pyramid Scheme for profit, exposure and amusement.”
Musk and his team, however, are fighting the allegations. “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. This court should put a stop to plaintiffs’ fantasy and dismiss the complaint,” the billionaire's lawyers said in a filing made in Manhattan federal court on Friday.
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Following Twitter’s decision to update its logo Monday, Dogecoin’s price spiked more than 26% to about $0.1, per data from CoinGecko.
Some Twitter users are convinced the change is simply an ill-timed April Fools‘ Day joke and that the blue bird will make its inevitable return shortly.
Doge for some reason is showing up on Twitter and I can only assume this was supposed to be an April Fools joke that took 3 days to roll out because no one knows how the site works anymore pic.twitter.com/dIlXiOLHoI
— windows 98 Tech Support (@Win98Tech) April 3, 2023
Others, however, suspect that the move may be an effort to stifle the spread of stories about the ongoing lawsuit against Musk.
Why do I get the feeling the Doge icon was added so when you search "Elon" and "Doge" the story of his racketeering lawsuit will be buried? pic.twitter.com/elDXz8vEDV — Jesse McLaren (@McJesse) April 3, 2023
Twitter’s comms team responded to a request for comment with a single poop emoji – per a recent policy change announced by Musk on March 19. The change came on the heels of mass layoffs and resignations at the company following Musk‘s November takeover.
Whether the change is a long-term one remains to be seen.
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