Image: DALL-E 2 | Prompt: Twitter bird logo evaporating
It’s hard to believe, but it’s barely been a week since Elon Musk bought Twitter and since then, the social network and especially its new CEO refuse to leave the headlines due to mass layoffs, statements, new features and controversial decisions. Now, the consequences of Musk’s latest moves are also coming .
Wants to end dependence on advertisers, but along the way he also runs them off
Since Musk assumed his new position, he has been trying to get Twitter out of the financial mire it entered, with all the means available: among other things, he has already had time to fire all of the company’s existing management, to announce that he will fire developers who do not meet the deadlines he set, to announce that he will allow everyone to receive “and Blue” for a monthly fee (higher than the company charged so far) as part of Twitter Blue services, and also of course to fire thousands of employees. All this – in one week, and with one clear goal: to end Twitter’s dependence on revenue from advertisers alone, and to move it to a model of paid subscriptions. It’s just that until the masses of paying users arrive, Musk and Twitter are dependent on corporations and advertising companies, and they didn’t like the latest moves that much.
According to the reports of the Wall Street Journal, more and more giant companies have frozen their advertising campaigns on Twitter in recent days. Among others, companies such as Volkswagen, Pfizer, Audi, the car giant GM and Mondelēz, maker of Oreo and Milka cookies, have frozen their campaigns. IPG, one of the largest advertising companies in the world, which is responsible for advertising budgets amounting to 40 billion dollars, also advised its clients to freeze advertising on Twitter for the time being. Contrary to all kinds of threats of boycotts such as in the case of the Spotify and Joe Rogan affair, here it seems that the trend is sufficiently worrying for Musk, who tweeted: “Twitter is suffering a massive decrease in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, and this despite the fact that nothing has changed in our content supervision and we have done all A possible effort to please the activists. This is completely screwed up! They are trying to destroy free speech in America!”. So says Musk.
Freedom of speech or no freedom of speech, for now Research of the organization that examines disinformation on the web claims that since Musk came to power on Twitter, more and more racist posts have been observed and, among other things, a 500% increase in the use of the “N-Word” has been observed in just 12 hours. According to the researchers, more and more bad actors are trying to test the new boundaries of Twitter in the era of Musk, and the road there is paved with attacks by troll groups and a lot of offensive content. Musk claim last week that until he establishes his new and diverse content oversight board, no significant changes will be made to the oversight decisions.
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Indeed, the WSJ claims that some advertisers are halting their advertising campaigns on Twitter in light of the roller coaster that is the Musk era and the fear of the changes he will bring to the platform. In addition, among the Twitter retirees and those fired you will find both the content supervisors and those responsible for Twitter’s customer relations with those advertisers. Musk has spent the past few days on video calls with prominent advertisers such as Coca-Cola and Unilever, assuring them in the conversation that Twitter will remain a safe place for brands.
A number of activist groups did call for an advertiser boycott of Twitter, claiming that posting on Twitter is like funding a platform that fuels hate speech, election denial and conspiracy theories. But all this is not really new on Twitter, what is new, is that these groups claim that Musk also fired some of the content monitoring teams, which may well cause concern among advertisers who do not want to find their pleasant ads next to offensive content.
And what happens to those who try to stretch the limits of satire at Musk’s expense? You can already guess
In the meantime, Musk’s new concept that should bring democratization to your feed (because not only politicians and celebs can get a blue V, but anyone willing to pay), is already becoming a fertile ground for memes and excellent trolling, including from users who were happy to open their wallets, but not just to stand out In recent days, the Twitter feed has been filled with quite a few users who change their name to Elon Musk, purchase the subscription, receive the coveted blue Hoy and apart from their handle, they look exactly like Musk’s account, which creates quite a bit of confusion, instead of the original concept of Hoy The blue that should indicate to you that you are indeed following the verified account of a particular company or person. In the case of someone who identifies himself as Chris Warcraft, for example, he pretended to be Musk to, among other things, write about how he is Likes to sip his body fluids at the start of each day. Musk’s Twitter, of course, restricted the account of that Chris. Freedom of expression? Maybe, but not at all costs.