TRENDING: Why did the doge meme replace the Twitter bird past April Fool's?
Netizens recently noticed that the Twitter bird icon is missing, with the Shiba Inu meme "doge" in its place.
The likely suspect was a late April Fool's Day joke for some Twitter users.
"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," one netizen tweeted, also complaining how the retweet feature wasn't working.
Others, however, suspected that the icon change might be connected with owner Elon Musk's $258-billion crypto lawsuit.
Separate high-engagement tweets read "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?" and "Oh god, is he really just trying to use putting doge as the icon to obscure search results on a lawsuit?"
On March 31, Elon asked a United States judge to dismiss a $258-billion racketeering lawsuit that accused him of running a pyramid scheme in support of the cryptocurrency Dogecoin.
As promised pic.twitter.com/Jc1TnAqxAV
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 3, 2023
"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," the lawyers of the world's richest man said in a legal filing.
Elon, in turn, posted an alternative explanation, uploading a screenshot of a Twitter exchange involving him that had someone telling him to "just buy Twitter and change the bird logo to a doge."
"Doge (pronounced DOHJ) is a slang term for 'dog' that is primarily associated with pictures of Shiba Inus (nicknamed "Shibe") and internal monologue captions on Tumblr," according to internet meme database Know Your Meme.
In June 2019, Doge broke the record for the most expensive NFT meme in history after selling for $4 million (P191 million). This is not to be confused with Dogecoin, an open-source peer-to-peer digital currency that also uses the Doge meme.
Aside from owning Twitter, Elon is the chief executive officer of SpaceX and Tesla, reclaiming his title as the world's richest person in late February. His net worth was reported then at around around $187.1 billion (P10.31 trillion).