A lot has happened in the week and a half since Elon Musk officially purchased the social network Twitter. Musk, it seems, managed to push backAnd in about 10 working days processes that corporations carry out over months. He led huge layoffs and introduced new products, which caused some commentators to praise his genius and others to wonder if the man had gone off the rails and even knew what he was doing with the “toy” he had purchased.
● Chaos, nerves and confusion: this is what Elon Musk’s first week on Twitter looked like
● “Keep messing with me, but you’ll pay $8”: Elon Musk fires, takes fire and answers critics
Musk, the richest man in the world, paid $44 billion for Twitter, an excessive price according to almost all opinions, especially in light of the current market situation, when advertisers, the social network’s almost exclusive source of revenue, are cutting back on their spending. Now, he seems to be going all out to justify the deal.
Musk took a loan of about 13 billion dollars for the purpose of the purchase, an amount that was loaded on Twitter as a debt. To repay the debt, the company will be required to pay about a billion dollars a year in interest payments. Twitter is not a big cash producer and in fact only in two years out of its 16 years of existence (2018 and 2019) has it recorded an accounting profit on the bottom line, so Musk is in a race against the clock to change the company’s math.
The layoffs: the employees were locked out of the systems
In March 2020, at the beginning of the Corona epidemic, the business tourism start-up Tripactions, led by two Israeli entrepreneurs living in the US, Ariel Cohen and Ilan Twig, received severe criticism after hundreds of employees at the company were fired in Zoom conference calls. Compared to the firing process that took place on Twitter on Friday, it seems Like a thoughtful move. In fact, it’s hard to recall a layoff at a tech company that was done as brutally and coldly as the one Musk led on Twitter.
After firing management and ousting Twitter’s board of directors, last Friday Musk led a 50% cut in the company’s 7,500-person workforce. This is an unusual step even in the current high-tech crisis period.
It all started on Thursday, when Twitter sent an unsigned email to employees stating that the next day layoffs would begin and they would find out if they were staying with the company or leaving. It’s just that many Twitter employees didn’t receive an official notice of their layoff at all. They had to infer the news when they were locked out of their computers, or when they could no longer log into the corporate software. Some workers in Europe received notices of their layoffs in the middle of the night and foreign workers on Twitter, who depend on work visas in the US, discovered that they might be deported from the country after being fired. In some cases, their company colleagues, the Americans, asked to go home in their place in an act of solidarity.
Musk and his people cut entire activities in the company. Like for example the dismissal of the entire human rights team of Twitter, which is supposed to protect users who are at risk around the world, including social activists and journalists. All this created an atmosphere of complete chaos in the company, which was only exacerbated by the fact that Musk fired most of the employees of Twitter’s communications team. According to reports on the network, some of the fired employees have already received a request from Twitter to return to work, in another act that indicates the confusion in the system.
Five employees who were fired from Twitter rushed to file a class action lawsuit against the company in San Francisco court claiming that the move was done illegally. According to federal law, companies must notify 60 days in advance of layoffs that will affect more than a third of employees. However, legal experts estimate that Musk protected himself from lawsuits when he announced that the fired would receive three months of future salary, which could be considered advance notice in retrospect. Even if the lawsuit should be dismissed, the chaos from the layoff process will accompany Twitter for a long time to come.
The advertisers: freeze the engagement with Twitter
Musk’s frenetic actions, coupled with his many statements that he intends to promote free speech on Twitter and restore previously blocked users, have managed to scare off some of Twitter’s biggest advertisers. The pharmaceutical company Pfizer, General Motors, Coca-Cola and the Volkswagen Group are just some of the big advertisers who have announced that they are suspending their activity on Twitter, with the aim of testing the new direction the social network is going. No advertiser wants their ad to appear next to a racist or provocative tweet, and the direction that Musk has indicated so far, of reducing content filtering on Twitter to a minimum, worries advertisers.
Reinforcing these concerns were media reports of a hundreds of percent increase in racist content on Twitter since Musk’s purchase. Musk tweeted that following the suspension of advertising, Twitter loses over 4 million dollars every day. He also tried to minimize damage: Musk strongly denied any changes to Twitter’s filtering policy and announced that he would not restore blocked users, such as former President Donald Trump, until the content council he intends to appoint meets.
But this is not the only reason for the abandonment of advertisers. Beyond the fact that many companies on the list of advertisers who abandoned Twitter compete with Elon Musk’s Tesla, human rights organizations in the US, such as the Anti-Defamation League and GLAAD, have increased the pressure on other brands not to advertise on Twitter. Musk accused those organizations of being: “Trying Destroy freedom of speech in America.”
Like everything in the divided US, Musk’s purchase of Twitter has become a political battle between Republicans and Democrats. While Republicans, who for years claim an anti-conservative bias on social media, welcomed Musk’s purchase and less restrictive policies, Democrats warned against it. So did President Joe Biden, who said that Musk bought a social network “that spreads lies all over the world.” All of this is happening just as the American political arena is boiling over for Tuesday’s midterm elections.
A reassuring message: Musk is keeping close the executive who clashed with Trump
The one standing by Musk’s side is Joel Roth, the head of safety and integrity at Twitter since 2018, who claimed that the extensive layoffs had very little effect on content filtering on Twitter. According to Roth, only 15% of the employees of the integrity and safety teams were affected by the layoffs (compared to half of the employees of the entire company) and Twitter’s core capabilities for managing content remained unchanged.
So is there any basis for accusations that Musk is leading Twitter into toxic realms of unmoderated content? According to Noam Schwartz, CEO and co-founder of the Israeli malicious content filtering start-up ActiveFence, Musk is being accused of wrongdoing. which lasted only an hour and was caused by bots, but this is something that Twitter recognized very quickly and blocked,” he says. “This activity began even before Musk’s time, so to attribute it to him is a political spin on the part of activists who launched a campaign about the fact that the sky is falling.
“We have to tell the truth – in practice, no fundamental change was made in the Twitter policy and I am sure that the advertisers will return to it after the company proves that they take the policy issues seriously.”
Schwartz points to the fact that Roth himself was not fired as a positive sign. “When Trump was kicked out of Twitter, the former president went right over Roth’s head, who even received threats on his life, so you can’t suspect Roth of being a neoconservative. Roth is seemingly the one who represents everything that is bad on Twitter for the perception of Musk and his friends and everything they want to destroy. The fact that he was not fired and that Musk actually brings him closer to him and shares his tweets, is very significant.”
According to Schwartz, Musk is ultimately a businessman who wants to generate revenue and profit for Twitter, and he also understands that the boycott by advertisers is a warning sign of what can happen if he does not monitor the content. “There is a direct relationship between the advertiser’s desire to advertise on the platform and how clean the platform is perceived,” says Schwartz. “I don’t think there is any reason to think that Twitter is going to be an evil empire or the dirtiest place on the net, and even the opposite – I think it will be a much better place.”
Engines of growth: the paid Blue Hoy – “get dirty on me for 8 dollars”
Along with cutting expenses through mass layoffs, Musk must also grow Twitter’s revenue line quickly. Already at the end of the week, he introduced the first significant change when the company began to require users to purchase an account verification check (a blue V) in exchange for $8 per month. Musk initially stated that the subscription would cost $20 per month and include additional benefits, but after the amount caused a public uproar and opposition within the company, it was decided to cut it.
Musk is marketing the move as a kind of tax for the rich, where governments, companies, celebrities, politicians and journalists who need the Blue Wave mark to maintain their brand will pay Twitter for it. “Keep messing with me all day, but it will cost you $8,” Musk tweeted at the weekend to his millions of followers. However, critics of the move point out that the blue check mark was initially intended to mark qualified sources of information and ensure that the tweeter is who he claims to be, when the commercialization of the mark will harm the ability to distinguish between true and false information.
Elon Musk / Photo: Associated Press, ASSOCIATED PRESS
In any case, it is clear that the commercialization of account verification will not bring significant amounts to the social network and is to some extent Musk’s first attempt to test the market, in preparation for adding more paid services to Twitter. In doing so, Musk will try to follow a path that almost no social network has dared to follow and collect a direct payment from the users, a strategy opposite to that led by, for example, Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook where everything is given for free. It is difficult to know at the moment whether users will agree to pay or whether we will see an exodus of influencers out of Twitter in favor of other alternatives.