Exactly one year ago, Elon Musk walked into Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters with a smile on his face and a smile in his hands. The enigmatic billionaire entrepreneur struck a deal to buy what he called a “de facto public plaza” for $44 billion, and he owned the company. Musk could do whatever he wanted with it.
A year later, Twitter is no more, after a haphazard rebrand was delayed for several months. out of control by Musk and others who left the company after realizing his demands for a “rigid” commitment to the company meant working around the clock at the whim of an eccentric leader whose thoughts changed daily.
Among them is Esther Crawford, Twitter’s head of product management, who was infamously photographed sleeping in a sleeping bag on the floor of Twitter’s office to satisfy Musk’s demands. Crawford left Twitter in April 2023 and is still on hiatus from her career. When she left she posted an explicit account said of her time with the company, “I don’t agree with a lot of his decisions and I’m surprised by his willingness to burn so much” – but she hoped it served a larger purpose.
It does not seem.
X, which continues to smolder in the Twitter ashes, is also damaged. One in eight Twitter users have stopped logging into the app every day since Musk took power. Some have switched to competing platforms, while others have simply abandoned social media. According to one analysis, fewer than one in four people know XX’s name.
“From my perspective as just a former employee, it appears that Musk has been very good at slowly eliminating everything that made Twitter valuable,” said Manu Cornet, a former Twitter software engineer whom Musk fired.
Cornet works as a cartoonist in addition to his day job, and documented his time on Twitter—and his experience of Twitter crashing—in a comic about The Mask and the Platform.
The list of problems Musk has created is enormous, Cornet said: “Careful moderation, labor, advertising revenue, and now even branding.”
It’s a sentiment echoed by others who left the company after Musk took over. “Twitter looks and feels ‘bad,'” said Melissa Ingle, a former contractor who worked as a senior data scientist at Twitter until she was fired a month after taking over under Musk. Since then, she has taught at San Jose State University and was chief data scientist at Technology Partners, a St. Louis-based IT company.
Ingle said: “It feels rude and disgusting to be on this site. This site has always appealed to a certain hyperlexical mentality, and now it’s all blatant racism and Roman history.”
In recent months, the platform has also faced difficulties in its first major test of a controversial live news event: the war between Israel and Hamas. “My main point is that the conflict between Israel and Hamas showed how important the security teams were,” said a former employee close to the team, who asked to remain anonymous because he is “still afraid of what this man will do.” . When Musk took office, he gutted Twitter’s content moderation, trust and safety, and curation teams, with devastating consequences.
The changes would again hurt Musk, the anonymous former employee said. “The lack of independent verification, trust and safety checks, and a team of curators to debunk misinformation has proven detrimental to the way this conflict is understood by people who previously had little or no context.”
And what this means for the world concerns those who follow the developments of big technology.
“Musk had been on top for 12 months as of late July.
Ahmed believes research is important and that Musk’s actions highlight the importance of action through regulation. “Lawmakers around the world must change the public’s relationship with social media companies by setting minimum standards for platform safety, transparency, accountability and responsibility,” he said.
The billionaire owner may be concerned about what will happen after his purchase. Musk has clashed with European regulators in recent weeks over the company’s failure to combat disinformation related to the conflict between Israel and Hamas, which could see him face hefty fines.
Any fine would worsen an already difficult financial situation: 31 of the 100 highest-spending advertisers tracked by marketing consultancy Ebiquity spent money on Twitter in September 2022, before Musk bought the platform. A year later there were only two of them left.
At the same time, Musk is requiring new Twitter users to pay $1 a year to post on the platform in some countries – a test that will likely be rolled out more widely if successful. That’s in addition to the $8-a-month premium subscription that Musk has unsuccessfully tried to convince users to accept in order to shore up the company’s finances. So far the number of users is disappointing.
“It has succeeded in scaring off users and advertisers,” Ingle said. “He somehow managed to turn a pretty dire financial situation into a bloodbath.”
X was contacted for comment but had not responded at the time of publication.
Source: I News
With a background in journalism and a passion for technology, I am an experienced writer and editor. As an author at 24 News Reporter, I specialize in writing about the latest news and developments within the tech industry. My work has been featured on various publications including Wired Magazine and Engadget.