Twitter as the Beginning of a New Era: The Story of Musk and the Rise and Fall of the Digital Town Square and the Return of Donald Trump
Musk’s penchant for drama has made his takeover of social media a messy affair. We arehours away from a conclusion to this saga. It’s the beginning of a new era for Twitter.
When he was going to purchase the company, Musk said he would use free speech and get rid of thebots to make the company better.
In the official deal announcement, he said “free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy” and that the future of humanity is at stake in the digital town square.
“Even slightly loosening content moderation on the platform is sure to spook advertisers, many of whom already find Twitter’s brand safety tools to be lacking compared with other social platforms,” Enberg said.
For a “keyhole view of what Twitter under Musk will look like,” just look at alternative platforms such as Parler, Gab and Truth Social that promise fewer restrictions on speech, said Angelo Carusone, president of the liberal nonprofit watchdog group Media Matters for America.
He said that “the bug” on those sites is the ability to say and do things that aren’t allowed on other social media platforms. And what we see there is that they are cauldrons of misinformation and abuse.”
On top of loosened moderation rules, a Musk-ownedTwitter would likely bring in the return of Donald Trump. After the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Twitter permanently banned Trump for breaking its rules against inciting violence.
“Would be great to unwind permanent bans, except for spam accounts and those that explicitly advocate violence,” he texted Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal shortly after agreeing to join the company’s board (a decision he soon backtracked).
Alex Jones, a conspiracy theorist, was kicked off for abusive behavior in the fall. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a lawmaker, had her account suspended for making false claims about the vaccine COVID-19.
One person who texted Musk in the days after his Twitter stake became public (whose name was redacted in court documents) advised the billionaire that “it will be a delicate game of letting right wingers back on Twitter and how to navigate that (especially the boss himself, if you’re up for that)” — an apparent reference to Trump.
The person suggested that Musk should hire a person who is smart and political to lead enforcement. Masters is the Republican Senate candidate in Arizona who has been endorsed by Trump and has echoed his false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.
What Did you do when Trump came back to Twitter? An internal memo from Musk’s Twitter campaign during a news conference in May 2022
Allowing Trump and others to come back could be a precedent for other social networks, with Facebook considering restoring the former president when it stops banning him in January 2023.
The replatforming of Trump will be easier for Meta and Mark to say “He’s already back on the platform”, since it will force them to acknowledge that he’s already there. Nicole Gill is the Executive Director of Accountable Tech, a progressive advocacy group.
Musk is expected to speak to Twitter employees directly Friday if the deal is finalized, according to an internal memo cited in several media outlets. Despite internal confusion and low morale tied to fears of layoffs or a dismantling of the company’s culture and operations, Twitter leaders this week have at least outwardly welcomed Musk’s arrival and messaging.
What work did you do this week? Musk snapped, before telling Agrawal that he was not joining the board and would make an offer to buy Twitter instead.
That’s good news for the billionaire who complains that the company is overstaffed for its size and that its costs outstrip revenues.
The cost and staff cuts are part of the equation. In the spring, Musk pitched investors that he would quintuple Twitter’s annual revenue to $26.4 billion by 2028 and attract 931 million users by that same year, up from 217 million at the end of 2021, according to an investor presentation obtained by The New York Times.
Given the bad state of the digital ad market and the changes that he wishes to make to moderation, he may have little choice other than to find alternate sources of revenue.
“Advertisers want to know their ads aren’t going to be associated with things that could turn off potential customers and they’re not going to subsidize or associate with things like extremists,” she said.
Twitter Takes a Break from Micro-Blogging to WeChat: Musk’s Deposition After a Crowdfunding Decision
Musk talked about using the micro-blogging site to create a new app. This is a reference to China’s WeChat app, which started life as a messaging platform but has since grown to encompass multiple businesses, from shopping to payments and gaming. “You basically live on WeChat in China,” Musk told Twitter employees in June. If we can recreate that, we’ll be a great success.
Other American tech companies, including Facebook and Uber, have tried this strategy, but so far Chinese-style super-apps haven’t caught on in the United States.
We’re told not everyone is upset with the company. Twitter has long suffered from a slow pace of product development; some employees we’ve spoken to have found Musk’s breakneck approach to product development at least somewhat refreshing.
Many Twitter employees have recently noted the absence of Parag Argawal, their current CEO, who Musk soured on after the two initially started talking about Musk joining Twitter’s board. “He has been completely absent for weeks,” one current Twitter employee, who requested anonymity to speak without the company’s permission, said of Argawal. “He has ghosted us,” said another. The blind, an anonymous message board for tech workers, has many negative comments about Argawal like those seen on the slack and the twitter employee section.
The execs received handsome payouts for their trouble, Insider reports: Agrawal got $38.7 million, Segal got $25.4 million, Gadde got $12.5 million, and Personette, who tweeted yesterday about how excited she was for Musk’s takeover, got $11.2 million.
Musk was scheduled to be deposed on October 6th and 7th, after having moved his deposition from late September. He announced he’d honor the contract his lawyers negotiated after all just days before the deposition was to take place. The deposition was going to be difficult, a judge found Musk likely deleted Signal messages that were relevant to the case. The deposition was delayed as Musk and Twitter worked toward a deal; Musk even received a court order halting proceedings to allow the deal to close by October 28th.
The departures come just hours before a deadline set by a Delaware judge to finalize the deal on Friday. She threatened to schedule a trial if no agreement was reached.
Twitter Takes Control of Twitter and Immediately ousts Top Executives: The Case of the Silicon Valley CEO Evan Gadde
Despite coming quickly, the major personnel moves had been anticipated and almost certainly will be the first in a long line of changes the CEO will make.
About the same time, he used Twitter to criticize Gadde, the company’s top lawyer. His statements were followed by harassment from other accounts. For Gadde, an 11-year Twitter employee who also heads public policy and safety, the harassment included racist and misogynistic attacks, in addition to calls for Musk to fire her. On Thursday, after she was fired, the harassing tweets lit up once again.
He continued: “There is currently great danger that social media will splinter into far right wing and far left wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society.”
According to Pinar Yildirim, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Musk’s position regarding free speech is not the same as it was before.
But it’s also a realization that having no content moderation is bad for business, putting Twitter at risk of losing advertisers and subscribers, she said.
“You don’t want a place where consumers are bombarded with stuff they don’t want to hear about, and the platform doesn’t take responsibility for that,” Yildirim said.
And overnight the New York Stock Exchange notified investors that it will suspend trading in shares of Twitter before the opening bell Friday in anticipation of the company going private under Musk.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/27/1132153277/elon-musk-takes-control-of-twitter-and-immediately-ousts-top-executives
Twitter Layoffs: Why Do People Get What They Want? After Musk and Personette’s Visit to the Wall, TWoP Grows Worrying
Sarah Personette, the company’s chief customer officer, said she had a “great discussion” with Musk on Wednesday and appeared to endorse his message to advertisers.
The enthusiasm Musk displayed when visiting TWoP headquarters this week stood in sharp contrast to the earlier suggestion that the building should be turned into a homeless shelter because few employees actually worked there.
Advertisers received a note on Thursday showing a new emphasis on ad revenue and the need for targeted ads that rely on collecting and analyzing personal information.
As of press time, though, no such message has been delivered to the company’s 7,500 or so employees. And with Musk reportedly intent on making cuts before Tuesday, when many employees are set to receive new stock grants, it appears that any such decisions will come down to the wire.
According to conversations with several employees over the weekend and today, the process has been frightening. In the absence of official communication workers have been gathering information in private conversations in order to share rumors.
The Washington Post reported that layoffs would hit roughly a quarter of the staff, heavily impacting teams including sales, product, engineering, legal, and trust and safety.
The company has become split into two camps: those waiting nervously to find out if they still have a job after the cuts, and those frantically working to ship new features under a threat of being fired.
One thing that made people nervous was the instruction on Friday afternoon that engineers print out the last 30 to 60 days of code they had written, as Platformer was the first to report. It was part of a set of measures Musk and his team have undertaken in an effort to identify Twitter’s highest and lowest performing employees as a precursor to layoffs.
What Will You Do Next? How a Software Engineer’s Life Has Changed in the Slack Channels after Musk Came Out?
Since no leader is willing to fill the void, you should just want to know that you are not alone. this sucks.
In other Slack channels, employees are sharing contact information in case they suddenly lose access to their communications, another employee told us.
Engineers have been told to finish at least two major projects within days or weeks. One of the changes would force users to pay a monthly fee in order to keep their verification badges. The second, which Axios first reported today and which we can confirm, is a plan to revive the short-form video app Vine, either as a standalone product or part of the core Twitter app. Alex had reported that in the case of changes to Blue, the features had to ship by November 7th or the team would be fired.
We’re told that the project has generated moderate enthusiasm so far. More than a dozen engineers volunteered to be a part of the project after Musk gave the go-ahead Sunday night.
Some employees are being told to go build something and show it off to Musk. In one Slack message we saw, an engineering director urged his team to come up with new products and features and share them directly with their new CEO. At best, you will be given some feedback. The director wrote that he might be asked to ship it asap. “At worst, you will be asked to stop and work on something else. Even in this case, at least you worked on something you love.”
At the time, the senior director of software engineering at social media site sent a note to his team that indicated big changes were on the way. “I think most important change is going to be cultural change,” he said, according to a copy of the email obtained by Platformer. “Some good, some bad.”
Do good engineering work if I am asked what to do now. Write something. Keep the site up. I know the criteria for being at Twitter is that. It’s not working on a fancy project for Elon. Shipping and delivering is the main reason for the culture change. I think it’s good for you to focus less on documentation and more on coding and shipping. If you want to be in a “special” group this week, code and ship 5x as [much as] before. Sexy is not a criterion for building what Elon thinks is sexy. The criteria is helping our users and being impactful. So you don’t need commands from me. You are software engineers. You know what needs to be written and improved. Do it. You are in charge.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/31/23434002/twitter-layoffs-internal-messaging-uncertainty-elon-musk
What does Musk really want from the e+e- annihilation? How excited is he? “I don’t know what he wants to achieve, but what does she want?”
Musk’s attention can be frightening. A person we talked to said that they had mixed feelings about working on the project Musk is known to be focused on.