Elon Musk has solely been in control of Twitter since late October. But already, he’s turned the corporate and its platform the wrong way up.
In the times after Musk took over, he booted prime executives, slashed rank-and-file headcount, pushed engineers to work more durable, and commenced fast-tracking a hodgepodge of doubtless revenue-generating options, together with charging customers to get or maintain a verification test mark.
And whereas Musk didn’t instantly change any of Twitter’s insurance policies towards offensive content material, within the hours after Musk took over there was a notable surge in hate speech on the app. Some of the customers posting felt emboldened by Musk’s “free speech absolutist” perspective, and actively tried to check the boundaries of what they might say on Twitter underneath the corporate’s new management.
Many present and former staff, social media teachers, and human rights advocates are involved that Musk might change Twitter for the more serious, turning it into an much more intense cesspool of detrimental content material than it already is. But others hope Musk can breathe new life right into a platform that was already bleeding its most prolific customers and, for years, has struggled to show a revenue.
Here are a few of the most vital methods Musk has modified the corporate to date.
Gutting Twitter’s workers
Musk started his reign as Twitter’s chief by firing prime executives. Within hours of the deal closing, CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, and head of authorized coverage, belief, and security Vijaya Gadde had been proven the door.
The week after he took over, Musk continued firing executives, together with Twitter’s advert chief, common supervisor of core tech, and chief advertising and marketing officer Leslie Berland (who only a few days earlier despatched a cheery word asserting that Musk was visiting the San Francisco workplaces). He additionally pulled in additional than 50 Tesla engineers to work for Twitter and assembled his personal circle of trusted advisers.
Now, Musk is transferring on to gutting Twitter’s rank-and-file workers. He’s reportedly planning to lay off some 50 p.c — upward of three,700 staff — from the corporate. Twitter knowledgeable its workers that layoffs would occur by 9 am PT on Friday in a company-wide e mail. By late Thursday night, a number of staff informed Recode or posted publicly on Twitter that that they had already been locked out of their work e mail and Slack accounts with none formal discover of whether or not they had been laid off.
These cuts can be the most important in Twitter’s historical past, and a number of other present and former staff Recode spoke with are involved that, in the event that they’re executed with out care, Twitter’s operations as a platform may very well be in danger. Musk has additionally reportedly deliberate to slash $1 billion from Twitter’s infrastructure prices, resembling server house, according to a report from Reuters, furthering these considerations.
Ahead of the layoffs, some staff had been combating to maintain their jobs and show their worth to the corporate by engaged on particular high-priority tasks, a lot of them at Musk’s course.
Several Twitter staff informed Recode that some colleagues labored 12-hour shifts over the weekend and slept on sofas within the workplace with a view to make Musk’s grueling deadlines.
“We’re trying to shoot our shot,” mentioned one Twitter worker.
But many staff who had been pulled into particular tasks and labored grueling shifts had been nonetheless laid off, sources informed Recode.
One Twitter worker described the morale on the firm after the layoffs as low, and mentioned that many colleagues who survived this spherical of cuts want that they had gotten laid off and gotten severance as a substitute. Twitter is giving many laid-off staff full pay and advantages by way of a minimum of January, though it’s not clear if this utilized to all staff, significantly these outdoors the US, sources mentioned.
Shortly after the cuts, a gaggle of 5 staff sued Twitter in a class-action lawsuit, alleging the corporate did not notify them of the upcoming layoffs as required by the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, or WARN Act, that requires sure employers to present a 60-day discover for mass layoffs within the US.
Emboldening the trolls
Musk has mentioned his main cause for purchasing Twitter was to make it a haven totally free speech. He’s echoed conservatives’ longstanding considerations that Twitter is politically biased towards right-wing speech regardless of the lack of proof of that bias.
Conservative politicians like former president Donald Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) have celebrated Elon Musk’s possession of Twitter as a significant win, with Trump saying he’s completely satisfied that Twitter “will no longer be run by Radical Left Lunatics and Maniacs.”
But Musk’s extra laissez-faire philosophy on content material moderation has additionally triggered one other group of individuals to have fun: trolls spreading racist, sexist, and in any other case hateful speech.
One instance: There was a 500 p.c enhance in makes use of of the n-word on Twitter within the 12 hours after Musk’s deal was accomplished, based on a research from the Network Contagion Research Institute, regardless that none of Twitter’s guidelines have modified on the matter.
Twitter has mentioned it’s engaged on lowering the visibility of those posts. But knowledge factors like this have spooked a number of main advertisers that don’t need their model affiliated with offensive content material, together with General Motors, Volkswagen, Audi, and Pfizer — who’ve are ready to see extra about what course the corporate will take underneath Musk’s management earlier than they resume advertisements.
Musk has tried to settle down advertiser considerations by tweeting a public word saying that he doesn’t need Twitter to show right into a “free-for-all hellscape.” On Thursday, Musk spoke with leaders of civil rights teams just like the NAACP, the Anti-Defamation League, and Color of Change, promising them that Twitter takes hate speech significantly, and that he gained’t reinstate any banned accounts (e.g., Trump) till after he units up a content material moderation advisory council, which he mentioned will a minimum of take a number of weeks.
Musk additionally informed civil rights leaders he would reverse his resolution to restrict the quantity of workers who can entry content material moderation techniques, one other one among their considerations.
But by Friday morning, civil rights leaders organizing underneath the banner “#StopToxicTwitter Coalition” mentioned that Musk had failed to carry true to his guarantees — and ramped up their calls for for main advertisers to pause all advertisements on the platform, Musk tweeted on Friday that Twitter had a “massive drop in revenue” because of “activist groups” who he accused of attempting to “destroy free speech in America.”
It’s not simply advertisers which are leaving Twitter due to Elon; there are additionally early indicators that Elon’s takeover and the ensuing negativity are inflicting some customers to depart.
One report in MIT Technology Review estimated some 877,000 accounts had been deactivated within the week after Musk’s deal closed. That’s greater than double the standard quantity in that very same time interval, based on knowledge from the agency Bot Sentinel that MIT Tech Review cited.
Of course, these are all estimates, and solely from a brief window of time. Twitter has additionally been dropping its most beneficial “heavy tweeters” in droves for some time now, based on a leaked inner report lined by Reuters, and that predates Musk’s takeover. But time will inform whether or not Musk exacerbates Twitter’s present downside of customers fleeing the platform.
Shaking up Twitter’s inner tradition
Musk has been working Twitter in his personal approach, just like how he runs his different firms: in an advert hoc and intense trend. Rather than speaking to his staff first, Musk typically tweets no matter he’s considering, together with his plans for the corporate.
Twitter workers have obtained little official communication, resembling emails or corporate-wide Slack messages, so removed from Twitter’s government management since Musk formally took over. One worker who spoke with Recode on the situation of anonymity referred to as it an “information vacuum.”
That’s been an adjustment for a lot of Twitter staff who’re used to a extra measured, communicative, and structured work tradition. One nameless Twitter worker informed the Washington Post that the work ambiance underneath Elon was like “working in Trump’s White House.”
Employees are turning to non-public or nameless communication platforms like Blind, Signal, and Discord to commiserate, a number of staff informed Recode, since they not really feel they are often candid on inner Slack or e mail.
Another main change Elon is making to Twitter’s inner tradition is to drastically ramp up the tempo at which new options are developed.
Normally, product modifications like those that Musk is proposing — resembling charging customers for verification — would take months and even years to implement at Twitter. Now, staff are being requested to execute them virtually in a single day.
This might drive the form of innovation that Twitter, a money-losing enterprise, would possibly want. But it might additionally go away workers demoralized, or worse, compromise the reliability and safety the app gives to its tons of of tens of millions of customers. Twitter already has present issues on this entrance: Former Twitter head of safety and inner whistleblower Peiter Zatko warned that the platform “was over a decade behind industry security standards” in September.
Making individuals pay for blue test marks
The first official product change that Musk confirmed after taking up Twitter was to start out charging $8 per 30 days for “blue check marks” — or the verification badges that Twitter at present provides to public figures like journalists, politicians, and celebrities.
The concept is that verification can be a part of a premium “Twitter Blue” subscription that individuals pay for, which incorporates different advantages like fewer advertisements and extra visibility on your Twitter replies to different individuals’s threads. Musk desires to open up verification to extra individuals — not simply journalists, politicians, and celebrities — so long as they’re keen to pay that worth.
This has triggered main debate amongst people who find themselves at present verified — a lot of whom mentioned they aren’t keen to pay to maintain their verification. After the well-known creator Stephen King complained concerning the authentic $20-a-month price ticket being floated round, Musk jumped in his replies to barter right down to $8. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-NY) gave her personal critique of the plan, mocking Musk’s “power to the people” framing of what’s in the end a paid characteristic.
Twitter verification was designed to ensure individuals actually are who they are saying they’re on-line. This does a service to Twitter’s consumer base by lowering scams, serving to to confirm trusted information sources, and stopping individuals from falling for impersonations. Musk’s plan to let anybody pay their approach into verification (and per the New York Times, Twitter is contemplating eliminating ID checks, in order that anybody may be whoever they need) might run the chance of undermining the belief verification is meant to supply.
Throwing different concepts on the wall
Aside from charging for Twitter verification, Musk has been planning a complete new set of modifications to the platform. While none of those are confirmed but, they’re reportedly within the works or being examined.
Those modifications embrace making individuals pay for sure forms of “high risk” video content material (many are speculating it might be grownup video content material), based on the Washington Post; bringing again Vine, the short-form video app Twitter acquired and later shuttered; altering the login web page to the discover web page; and charging individuals for sending DMs to high-profile customers.
For now, it looks like Elon is throwing a bunch of concepts out to see which of them work. As one investor in Musk’s deal, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, mentioned on the Web Summit convention in November, he expects solely 10 p.c of Musk’s concepts “will stick.”
So far, a lot of Musk’s concepts (like Vine and paid movies) are outdated ones that Twitter has already tried — and failed at.
Over time, it is going to turn out to be clear if Musk will be capable to efficiently resurrect these outdated concepts — and his new ones, like paying for a test mark — with a really completely different work tradition and workers than Twitter had earlier than.
We’ll maintain updating this submit as Musk continues to form Twitter, for higher or worse.
Update, November 4, 3 pm: This story has been up to date with new particulars concerning the Twitter layoffs.