We get it, Elon. You’re richer than God, you have the sense of humor of an eight-year-old, and you’re determined to shove yourself in everyone’s face every single day. If you begin to slip from the news cycle for even one second—or appear in it for the wrong reasons—you panic.
In case any readers out there don’t know what I’m talking about, Elon Musk recently replaced the Twitter logo at the top of the landing page in Twitter’s web app. Where we used to see the familiar blue bird, we now see a little picture of a shiba inu. The picture is from the doge meme, which is only recognizable to a small subset of the people who use Twitter, and is funny to an even smaller subset of that first subset. Basically, somewhere there are 5 or 6 frat boys hanging out in a stinky dorm room laughing at the dog picture, and they’re its target audience. Out of about 450 million Twitter users.
There’s some compelling evidence that Musk made the change to distract from a $258 billion dogecoin-related lawsuit. Whatever the explanation is, though, the presence of the doge is a nauseating reminder that one of the world’s most heavily-used social media sites is now the private sandbox for a thin-skinned, thick-skulled manchild who fell into a bunch of money by spending another bunch of money he already had. 450 million people’s Twitter pages now have a dog on them because this one guy thought, in his own words, “Haha that would sickkk.”
But there’s a way to peel it off of your page, if you so desire.
Twitter user ThatDarnShrink used their past experience with coding to tweet out simple instructions for getting rid of the doge.
I tried it, and it worked! If you’re using Chrome, right click on the doge, then hit “inspect.” A window with code will open up, with one line highlighted (that’s the doge code). Right click the highlighted line, then click “hide element.” Et voilà! The shiba will disappear, leaving a blank white space.
It’s not a foolproof method. I don’t know what to tell you if you use another browser. If you open up Twitter in a browser on another device, or log out and log back in, the doge will come back. But if you need a little respite from Musk’s aggressive childishness, then this trick may grant you that for a little while.
IMPORTANT NOTE: While the headline of this article refers to “that stupid dog picture,” I’d like to reassure everyone that it’s the picture that’s stupid, not the dog. All dogs are pure and good, and it’s a shame that an innocent pooch got dragged into this mess.
(featured image: Alexander Beurkle / Getty Images)
