When the employees of Twitter they saw enter Elon Musk at its headquarters with a sink on his back, no one imagined that the message he was trying to convey would be literal: do a deep cleaning red social. O hundirla, as it would translate from the original phrase that accompanied the video published by the new CEO of the blue bird, “let that sink in”. Since the earthquake started by the tycoon on October 27, the news around the social network does not stop happening: massive layoffs, a pay wall that produced stock market falls of consolidated companies, flight of employees and investors and even the rehabilitation of the account of the former president of the United States Donald Trump. It is not surprising that since the 18th of this month thousands of condolences have accumulated on Twitter, although for once they are not addressed to a famous person for the false announcement of his death, but to the social network itself. can he overcome Twitter is this debacle?
The numbers speak for themselves. Since the management change on October 27, the number of advertisers on Twitter dropped from 3,900 in May to 2,900. Investors of the caliber of General Motors, which had invested $15.6 million in the first nine months of the year, have suspended advertising cash flow. Others like General Mills, the manufacturer of brands such as Häagen-Dazs, Pfizer or Mondelez, the owner of Oreo cookies, have also paralyzed their advertising investments, as published by The Wall Street Journal.
This first decline has been reflected in the company’s valuation. According to estimates by the financial magazine Barron’s. If Elon Musk bought Twitter for a total of $44 billion on October 27, now the value of the little blue bird would have been reduced to 17,600 million dollars. Shock waves from the earthquake caused by Musk have reached even to Teslawhich has lost 133,000 million euros since it broke into Twitter.
To stop the plummet of ads, Musk announced the failed ‘premium’ version of the social network, Twitter Blue, in which advertisers would have a paywall and verified accounts were required to pay $8 per month for verification. In a single day, companies such as the pharmaceutical Eli Lilly or Tesla saw their shares fall on the stock market due to messages written by users who had created false company accounts. In principle, Musk will relaunch this paid subscription on November 29 with new restrictions, although still the conditions for receiving the blue ‘tick’ are not clear.
employees on the run
Twitter’s stability depends not only on the funding it receives, but also on the engineers who maintain the system. Although at first he had ruled out mass layoffs, the self-styled ‘Chief Twit’ announced by mail a cut of 3,500 employees out of the 7,500 that made up the workforce. But the catastrophe did not come until November 16. Musk gave his workers an ultimatum: either they committed to “working long hours at a high intensity” or they left the company.
And most have opted for the second, among them a significant number of programmers and engineers of vital importance for the stability of the system. Some specialized American media estimate that the current staff maintains only about 1,000 people or even less. The rest have said goodbye to their colleagues on Twitter using the hashtags #LoveWhereYouWorked and #RIPTwitter.
The bleeding of employees has raised suspicions about the possible stability of the company. In the words of one of its chief software engineers, Peter Clowes, only 3 engineers of the 75 remain who made up his team. “If a network cable goes unplugged, or if a hard drive fills up, or if there’s a little glitch in the power switch somewhere, there aren’t enough people to deal with these situations,” he admitted in his personal account. Twitter.
Absence of content regulation
Beyond the operation of the platform itself, there are concerns about safety and freedom of expression Twitter. “Twitter’s new policy is free speech, but not free reach,” Elon Musk wrote on his account. He has also stated that negative or hateful messages “will be minimized and demonetized.” “You won’t find the tweet unless you specifically search for it, which is not much different from the rest of the Internet,” he said. Hours later, he has restored the controversial account of Donald Trump, suspended since January 8, 2021 for the assault on the Capitol, after conducting a survey in favor of the former president.
Users have taken the “liberation” of the blue bird literally and the comments racistsanti-Semitic, sexist and xenophobic they roam freely by the social network since the arrival of Musk, another of the consequences of the lack of personnel to regulate the content. Hence, many of them are looking for safer alternatives. One of them, the open source social network Mastodon, has added 1.4 million users since October 27. Other platforms that have been in decline for years, such as Tumblr, have been revived thanks to the massive flight from Twitter. Only time will tell if the blue bird’s social network will be able to overcome its fall.