Musk said that he has seen a huge drop in revenue at the micro-blogging site

Twitter Firefights After Musk Shutdown: The Case for a Deeper Look at the Musk-Trump Insight into the Hate Crime of Twitter

So long as Musk can keep Twitter functioning properly despite having fewer employees, many users will likely stick around, perhaps even more so following the return of controversial accounts that tend to make news with incendiary comments on the platform. Even as people worry about the future of the platform, they are still using it on their own. The billionaire wants to make it more convenient for creators to earn money on the platform.

Musk also met earlier this week with a group of leaders of civil society organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League, Free Press and the NAACP, to address concerns about a rise in hate on the platform. According to representatives who attended the meeting, they were encouraged by Musk’s willingness to talk and his initial commitments not to change the company’s content policies ahead of the mid-terms, but urged him to take further steps to protect the platform.

By bringing Trump and other controversial figures back to the platform, Twitter may have greater appeal to the right-leaning advertisers that do business on alternative platforms like Trump’s Truth Social. While there is a market to advertise to “people buying gold, people buying survivalist home kits, guns and weapons,” Twitter has long been known as a more politically neutral, if not somewhat left-leaning, platform and may struggle to attract such companies, said Michael Serazio, a communications professor at Boston College.

And in less than a week since Musk acquired the company, its C-suite appears to have almost entirely cleared out, through a mix of firings and resignations. Musk has taken down the former board of directors.

According to Insider, the execs received huge payouts for their trouble, and Personette was the highest paid with $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. A judge found in the case that Musk probably deleted Signal messages which were relevant to the case. Musk received a court order that halted proceedings to allow the deal to close by October 28th as they worked toward a deal.

Friday’s layoffs had been brutal for all involved, including those involved in planning them — many of whom themselves lost their jobs. The process varied by the team, so some managers were asked to submit one sentence explaining what the employee did and another justifying their continued employment at the micro-communications company.

Twitter, the Everything App, and the Law: An Employer Action Against Twitter for Public Affairing with Unauthorized Content on WeChat

Twitter faces challenges to its free speech stance in court, as the Supreme Court agreed to take up two cases that will determine its liability for illegal content.

More broadly, Musk has talked about using Twitter to create “X, the everything 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 with Twitter, we will be a great success.

A class action lawsuit was filed Thursday in federal court in San Francisco on behalf of one employee who was laid off and three others who were locked out of their work accounts. It alleges that Twitter intends to lay off more employees and has violated the law by not providing the required notice.

A copy of the email obtained by CNN says that if your employment isn’t impacted, you will get a notification via your Twitter email. “If your employment is impacted, you will receive a notification with next steps via your personal email.”

The memo cites the deep layoffs of Twitter trust and safety teams, the resignations of high-profile executives, and the slew of “verified” impersonation accounts as being key issues for advertisers. “Evidence that the risk to our clients’ brand safety has risen sharply to a level most would find unacceptable,” the memo reads. In the short term, we recommend pausing activity on the platform until the platform can prove that it has regained control of its environment.

The class action lawsuit states that there is a violation of the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act by the company.

The WARN Act requires an employer with 100 or more workers to provide 60 days of advanced written notice of a mass layoffs at 50 or more employees.

Steve Jobs and his post-PC business, Apple, were laid off Wednesday night, and his company would make $1/m$ profit – a tribute to Steve Jobs

At the time, Jobs had been developing personal computers for 20 years, his entire adult life. He was used to running a company that he founded and led the team that created its flagship product. In his years away from Apple, he had founded another computer company with a forward-thinking approach to the internet and next-generation operating systems. He was also a person named Steve Jobs. If anyone could quickly turn around the near-bankrupt computer giant, it would be him. It took him many months to come up with his plan. It was the iMac that would help Apple get back into the black, but the entry into non-PC devices like the iPod in 2001 and the iPhone in 2007 was enough to turn it into a profit machine. And Apple’s post-PC future wasn’t even on Jobs’ road map in 1998.

Musk does not need to look further than his own successful companies to see the absurdity of his haste. The company was five years old when he took over. Musk came up with a plan to turn the company around but it didn’t make an annual profit until after 17 years. Musk deservedly gets a lot of credit for what Tesla has achieved—and for, among other things, his persistence. Musk has two companies, the first is a private company that doesn’t report earnings. But making rocket ships is the ultimate test of patience—it takes years to even launch successfully, and cutting corners to go faster can wind up killing people.

In a letter to employees obtained by multiple media outlets, the company said employees would find out by 9 a.m. Pacific Standard Time if they had been laid off. The email did not say how many people would lose their jobs.

He removed the company’s board and installed himself as sole board member. Many people on the micro-collegium took to the social networking site Thursday night to support each other, often sending out blue heart emojis in order to signify the blue bird logo.

Barry C. White said Thursday the Employment Development Department had not received any recent notifications from the micro-blogging site.

Why Twitter is Fading on Social Media? An Insider’s Perspective on the GM-Facebook and Volkswagen Payout Shutdown

The layoffs come at a tough time for social media companies, as advertisers are scaling back and newcomers — mainly TikTok — are threatening the older class of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

Facebook’s parent company, Meta Platforms Inc., recently posted a revenue decline, and its shares are at their lowest levels since 2015. Weak earnings reports from Microsoft and Alphabet preceded Meta’s disappointing results.

Musk said in a

            tweet earlier this month that the previous three months had been “extremely tough, as had to save Twitter from bankruptcy,” but that the company “is now trending to breakeven if we keep at it.”

General GM asked to pause campaigns as well, according to another Twitter employee. “The initial reason they gave is elections, but it looks like an open-ended pause, because the team requested to meet next week to help them make a case to global on why they shouldn’t.” Later, this same employee added: “Pause on [GM] til end of year confirmed and implemented. Brand safety is the reason for now.

Volkswagen told its brands to stop paying for work on the platform until further notice.

The Wall Street Journal first reported the moves and stated that Pfizer and Mondalez are pausing advertising on the social network. They didn’t reply to the request for comment.

General Motors had previously said it would pause paying for ad space on the social network in order to look at its new direction. Toyota told CNN that it is in discussions with key stakeholders and is monitoring the situation on the website and on social media.

The Interpublic Group layoffs, the paywall, and Twitter – what will they look like next to a big bang?

Interpublic Group advised its clients to stop advertising on it’s platform after seeing the impact on consumer brands.

That creates a challenge for brands, which are sensitive to the types of content their ads run against, an issue made more complicated by social media. Most marketers don’t like the thought of having their ads running next to things like hate speech or pornography.

Civil society leaders worry that misinformation and other harmful content would spread on the platform in the lead up to the US Midterm elections.

Musk is trying to stop an advertiser exodus. Musk’s team spent Monday “meeting with the marketing and advertising community” in New York, according to Jason Calacanis, a member of Musk’s inner circle.

The ADL, Color ofChange, Free Press, and GLAAD all pointed to the mass layoffs of staff on Friday as a key factor in their thinking, due to fears that they will make campaign integrity policies more difficult to enforce.

The representatives of the organizations said that Musk had betrayed the private commitments he made to the groups by his erratic behavior after meeting with them.

With Musk continuing to fire people impulsively, entire teams have been wiped out, and their work is being handed to other overstretched teams that often have little understanding of the new work that is being assigned to them.

Today let’s talk a bit more about how the company botched its layoff process, what happened inside Twitter on Monday, and what that paywall might look like.

An employee tells me that a tech company went too far: to tell them that they’ve come back and tell them they’re going to come back

Managers agonized over the decisions, and jockeyed with their peers in an effort to preserve employment for the most vulnerable among them: pregnant women, employees who have cancer, and workers on visas among them, a former employee told me.

Some teams were cut more than others; several were wiped out entirely. As it turned out, though, the company went too far. As I was the first to report on Saturday, within hours of the layoffs, some managers were already being told to ask select laid-off employees if they wanted their old jobs back.

It began as a rumor on Blind, the app where employees of various companies can chat anonymously with their coworkers. Within a day it had been posted on public channels.

I want to let everyone know that we have the chance to ask folks left off if they’ll come back. One message that was read to employees was from a manager, who said that he had to put together names by 4 pm on Sunday. “I’ll do some research but if any of you have been in contact with folks who might come back and who we think will help us, please nominate before 4.”

“I think we might use some Android and iOS help,” the manager added. Engineers and Designers have been reaching out to the company in an effort to get them back, according to Platformer.

Some workers have begun to consult with lawyers over their options in the event that they are recalled. Others are in open revolt, tweeting public threads about various aspects of the organization that have been broken after the ready-fire-aim disaster of Musk’s layoffs process.

Meanwhile, remaining managers are bracing themselves for a much higher workload than they were previously used to. A person I talked to told me that technical managers ought to spend half their time writing code and at the same time manage at least 20 individual contributors. The others were given higher number of direct reports.

“The couple of teams that are on his pet projects are doing 20-hour days,” one employee told me. “But the majority of the company is kind of just sitting around. No hierarchy, no priorities, and in many instances, no idea who your team is is other things like an organization chart and a chain of command.

Managing Musk’s Twitter Blue Move: What Has It Meant? Employees’ Anisotropy, Benefits, and Their Expectations

Twitter, however, is an acquisition and is not necessarily full of Musk fans. That makes it a less forgiving environment for Musk. Like, an early subset of Twitter users are Something Awful forum goons — the most prominent of whom is Dril — and they love fucking with people. Plus, Musk’s Twitter Blue plan to devalue verification check marks motivated a bunch of people who didn’t like Musk to go out with a bang by impersonating him, largely because they knew it would make him mad. It is likely that it did. Certainly, that would explain why his very first policy change was to increase punishment for impersonation.

Meanwhile, the health team was told to listen to Musk adviser David Sacks’ podcast for insights into why they had just lost half their colleagues, according to a former employee. Sacks, a venture capitalist who helped to manage the Musk transition, is one of the co- hosts of the “All- In” show.

“The most recent podcast covers the current layoffs happening across tech and provides some insight into why this is happening/necessary,” a vice president told employees. I think it’s important to understand the macro environment we are operating in by listening.

Employees were more interested in their health benefits, which have become a question mark. The open-enrollment period was supposed to begin today but no information was available in the human-resources system. Several questions about benefits were unanswered by management.

By the day’s end, I’m told, at least some teams had began to hold meetings in which employees were informed who their managers are, what their organization charts look like, and what their priorities will be.

On one hand, the company is telling advertisers that it is thriving, The Verge’s Alex Heath reported, adding 15 million daily users since the end of the second quarter.

The Blue, Twitter, and the Pay Wall: A Story About Musk, Sacks and the Phenomenology of the Paywall

There has been a disaster with the roll out of Musk’s first signature project, a new version of the micro-blogging website’s subscription service.

The new Blue faces bigger problems. The existing version only had a little more than 100,000 active subscribers, Platformer has learned. The new version will be 37.5 percent more expensive, and its value seems murky for most regular users of the platform. It’s unclear how the company will persuade enough people to subscribe to justify the effort.

A debate about the effects on the platforms of unleashing thousands of new verified accounts was the cause of the delay.

Musk doesn’t care. A user replied, “The beauty of this is each account that gets verified paid $8.” Twitter keeps the money and suspends the account. It’s genius and I hope more folks do this. It’s free money for Twitter.” Musk replied with a bag of money and a couple of other items.

If you want to know how serious Musk and Sacks are about the paywall, you couldn’t find it. It also does not appear imminent, as the Blue team is wholly occupied with the launch of expanded verification.

When Twitter’s Debt Goes Free, It’s Good Again, TWITTER. What Elon Musk (Makah) and Mark Cuban (Lambda) told me

I did not think chaos would take off so fast, but this is the rules. This owns so hard. It’s good again, TWITTER. We’re no longer locked in here with Elon Musk — Elon Musk has locked himself in here with us.

Taking an immediate loss is what banks will now be expected to take after the debt is paid off. For a while, banks may hold on to the debt to see whether or not the current market conditions change. But if Twitter is obviously shitting the bed, unloading that debt gets even harder. Now, Musk is the richest guy in the world, so banks might be willing to negotiate terms with him about debt repayment. I don’t know whether they want to hold these loans for a long while or who will buy them. It is difficult for other leveraged buy-out in tech to get done if banks can’t place the debt.

It is not a cut of the money that you send to people you wish to send money to. It does take a cut of the revenue from Super Follows, a way to make your tweets a subscription service, but Twitter’s share is dwarfed by the fees taken by Apple for in-app purchases.

It is on the internet and there is forum drama. A blue check mark looks exactly like the one that verified users get, but it’s not required of blue users, who don’t have to verify their identity. To an unwary user, that might look sufficiently like the actual Nintendo account to do brand damage.

I don’t think a lot of advertisers would want to come back to someone with that attitude toward impersonation, even without an economic downturn. The open question to me is whether users want to stay in that environment — one that’s just gotten a new layer of hoaxing and scammers. Billionaire Mark Cuban has already complained that the influx of new checkmarked users has made his mentions miserable. Cuban’s thoughts are one reason people stay on the platform — drive him off, and Twitter is less valuable.

The employee cited the disastrous relaunch of Twitter Blue, which resulted in brands being impersonated and dozens of top advertisers fleeing the platform.

It is risky debt with a B1, which is on the lower end of the junk rating spectrum. “Investor appetite for this debt clearly isn’t as large as it was four months ago.” Moody’s stated that a major driver of risk was the governance of the company.

According to an internal memo, one of the world’s biggest ad firms, representing brands like Mcdonald’s and Apple, is suggesting clients refrain from spending money on the social networking site.

Telling Musk and Musk’s Team What to Expect: Implications of Blue for Social Lobbying and Scamming on Twitter

The significance of this began to register with Musk, and he now requires that satirical accounts have parody in their name and bio. It is not possible to say that Musk and his team weren’t warned about the consequences.

The company’s trust and safety team prepared a seven page list of recommendations in the days before the launch to help Musk avoid the most obvious and damaging consequences of Blue. The document, which was obtained by Platformer, predicts with eerie accuracy some of the events that follow.

The team labeled the issue in the highest risk category as P0, and it was the first recommendation that saidMotivated scam/ bad actors could pay to leverage increased amplification to achieve their ends.

“Impersonation of world leaders, advertisers, brand partners, election officials, and other high profile individuals” represented another P0 risk, the team found. “Legacy verification provides a critical signal in enforcing impersonation rules, the loss of which is likely to lead to an increase in impersonation of high-profile accounts on Twitter.”

On November 1st, when the document was circulated internally, Musk was considering a $99-a-year annual subscription for Blue; only later, after an exchange online with writer Stephen King, did he lower the cost. The move made fun of brands and government officials an impulse buy of $8 made them more at risk for scam.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/14/23459244/twitter-elon-musk-blue-verification-internal-warnings-ignored

Twitter Elon Musk Blaze Verification Internal Warnings Ignored: Why Users Shouldn’t Forget to Invest with the Resources They’re After

The team also noted removing the verified badge and its related privileges from high-profile users unless they paid, coupled with the heightened impersonation risk, would potentially drive them away from Twitter for good. “Removing privileges and exemptions from legacy verified accounts could cause confusion and loss of trust among high profile users,” they wrote. “We use the health-related protections … to manage against the risk of false-positive actions on high-profile users, under the assumption that the accounts have been heavily vetted. If that signal is removed we run the risk of false positives or the loss of privileges, such as higher rate limits, leading to user flight.

The company’s trust and safety team did win support for some solutions, including retaining verification for some high-profile accounts using the “official badge.”

For the most part, though, the document offers a wish list for features that would make the product safer and easier to use, most of which have not been approved.

Despite the warnings, the launch proceeded as planned. A few days later, with the predictions of the trust and safety team largely realized, Musk belatedly stopped the rollout.

Functions affected included content moderation, recruiting, ad sales, marketing, and real estate, among others. At this point, it’s unknown how the service will be affected by the loss of so many moderators. But it seems clear that Twitter now has dramatically fewer people available to police the site for harmful material.

“One of my contractors just got deactivated without notice in the middle of making critical changes to our child safety workflows,” one manager noted in the company’s Slack channels. This is particularly worrisome because Twitter has for years struggled to adequately police child sexual exploitation material on the platform, as we previously reported.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/14/23459244/twitter-elon-musk-blue-verification-internal-warnings-ignored

Disappearance of Social Responsibility: Twitter and Slack-Like Tweets During the 2016 Silicon Valley Worker Black-Box Outcome

Similar messages trickled in on Blind, an app that allows coworkers to talk to each other without being seen, and on external Slacks, where employees have established to have more candid discussions.

Several workers said they had learned about their employment status after seeing our tweets, attempting to log in to Gmail and Slack, and finding that they no longer had access.

The employees told us that they had been bracing for cuts since the layoffs. But the abrupt nature of the cuts will likely send many former contractors scrambling: as Platformer was first to report, vendors told them via email their medical benefits would end today, their final day of employment.

The past used to be where committees went nowhere, says one employee. If you want to improve something, you generally have the right to do it. But that’s a double edged sword — moving that fast can lead to unintended consequences.”

Employees continue to show a great deal of solidarity among one another. The goons are those who have carried out Musk’s orders and who are mostly volunteer venture capitalists and on-loan engineers.

Twitter’s Code Freeze: Why It’s Taking So Long to Be, and Why It Isn’t Until After Elon Gets Better

It was more than just a code freeze, it was an event where engineers could commit code but not deploy it. Those are fairly common, and Twitter has been under one for most of the time since Musk took over. It is generally intended to reduce the chance that a bug will cause problems with the system.

Engineers were told they couldn’t even write any code until further notice in an internal email. The email said that there would be exceptions if the change is needed to resolve an issue with a production service, and that employees get approval from the VP and that change needs to be made.

The engineers who attended the late-night meeting were confused. Is it possible to reference a ticket? asked an engineer who was being tasked with implementing the freeze. I don’t see what’s happening. A colleague said they don’t have much context as of now. “But this is coming from Elon’s team.”

“I’d like to apologize for Twitter being super slow in many countries. The app is making a home timeline just by batches of RPCs. Musk tweeted on Sunday morning, referring to remote procedure calls. Musk also complained about the number of microservices Twitter employs, which are generally understood to prevent the entire site from breaking every time one part of it goes down.

Instead, the experience is not great in India, for example. That’s because the payload gets delivered from further away (laws of physics come into effect) and that back-and-forth data transfer between the phone and the data center starts compounding.

India has a higher concentration of low-power phones that perform worse in general than our more powerful phones.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/14/23459244/twitter-elon-musk-blue-verification-internal-warnings-ignored

Why Does Twitter Freeze? After the Blue Event, Twitter’s Global Business Lead Confirmed It was a High-Risk Media Buy

Why does the code freeze? No one knows for sure, but some are speculating that Musk has grown paranoid that some disgruntled engineers may intend to sabotage the site on their way out.

Eli Lilly paused all of its ad campaigns on Friday due to the Blue rollout disaster. The move potentially cost Twitter millions of dollars in revenue, according to the Washington Post. (A “verified” fake account impersonating Eli Lilly had said insulin would now be free, and it took Twitter six hours to remove the tweet.)

Many of the employees who worked on their campaigns have been fired, including after a round of layoffs and exits Monday.

“I know that many of your markets and clients are seeing large declines in Q4 and in particular L7D,” wrote Twitter’s global business lead in Slack. “Please add any commentary, questions, issues in this thread and I’ll endeavor to raise as many as possible TY!”

The data that had been accidentally deleted was for a service that set rate limits for using the micro-messaging service. The team that worked on that service left the company in November.

According to an email obtained by platformer, GroupM, the biggest media-buying agency in the world with $60 billion in annual media spend, told its clients that Twitter was a high-risk media buy. The agency partnerships lead said that GroupM has updated their brand safety guidance to high risk as a result of the senior departures. They know that our policies are in place, but they feel that there is uncertainty about their ability to scale and manage fines at the moment.

–Demonstrated commitment of effective content moderation, enforcing current Twitter Rules (e.g. account impersonation, violative content removal timing, intolerance of hate speech and misinformation)

GroupM and Twitter: Why Do Some App Stores Look Like They Shouldn’t Be? Comments on Musk’s Facebook Takeover of Twitter

Some users said that after Musk announced he’d be cutting off up to 80 percent of his services, two-factor rimetrics stopped working. Others reported that their archives were hard to download and that they experienced partial site outages.

There are people who know how to fix all those things, but they either no longer work for the company or have been told not to ship any new code. And the question haunting engineers at the end of the day was not whether any new cracks in the service would emerge, but how many, and when.

GroupM works with some of the biggest companies in the world. GroupM has a lot of overlap with its list of clients, which can be seen in a graphic that describes how a few brands make pretty much everything at the grocery store.

Those requests are, to put it bluntly, zero percent surprising. Companies don’t want to advertise on platforms where their messages are offensive and inoffensive, or where a fake picture of their profile is posted on websites that are often used for hate speech or conspiracy theories.

GroupM didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment. Twitter no longer has a communications department to reach out to with such requests. Platformer has seen an internal message that saysTwitter is working through GroupM requirements with leadership.

The move to a subscription business is something that has always made sense for Twitter, according to the associate professor of marketing at USC. Because it didn’t offer the same level of user targeting, we have long been smaller than rivals such as Facebook.

In an article in the New York Times last week, Yoel Hershkovitz, former head of trust and safety at TWo, said the company could be in trouble if it isn’t compliant with the app store rules. The app stores have previously removed social media apps for failing to protect their users from harmful content, and Roth suggested that Twitter had already begun to receive calls from app store operators following Musk’s takeover. The head of Apple’s app store deleted his account on Saturday.

In the weeks since Musk took over Twitter — which was immediately followed by an uptick in hateful content — there has been much hand-waving from users about moving to other platforms, and several high-profile accounts have announced their exits, including director Shonda Rimes and model Gigi Hadid. It’s not clear whether Musk’s claim that platform usage is at an all-time high is a true reflection of a decline in the user base.

Even still, there is no guarantee that continuing to capture the online world’s attention will translate into subscription payments or other revenue growth.

Why is Twitter so alive? The CEO of Twitter says it doesn’t matter what you see – but does it talk about what you read and how you don’t

For weeks now, Elon Musk has been preoccupied with worries about how many people are seeing his tweets. The CEO of Twitter took his account private for a day to see if it would increase the size of his audience. The move came after several prominent right-wing accounts that Musk interacts with complained that recent changes to Twitter had reduced their reach.

On Tuesday, Musk gathered a group of engineers and advisors into a room at Twitter’s headquarters looking for answers. Why are his engagement numbers tanking?

“This is ridiculous,” he said, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”

Musk told the engineer that he had been fired. (Platformer is withholding the engineer’s name in light of the harassment Musk has directed at former Twitter employees.)

Twitter sources say the view count feature itself may be contributing to the decline in engagement and, therefore, views. The smaller buttons were made harder to use due to the larger view.

“Shows how much more alive Twitter is than it may seem, as over 90% of Twitter users read, but don’t tweet, reply or like, as those are public actions,” he tweeted.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/9/23593099/elon-musk-twitter-fires-engineer-declining-reach-ftc-concerns

What does a manager in the San Francisco headquarters of Micro-Messaging Services have to do about work?” an employee in the building says “I am sad about what happened last weekend”

One of the employees said that they had not seen much in the way of cogent strategy. A large amount of our time is devoted to three main areas: putting out fires, performing impossible tasks, and improving efficiency, without clear guidelines of what the expected end results are. We mostly move from dumpster fire to dumpster fire, from my perspective.”

“There’s times he’s just awake late at night and says all sorts of things that don’t make sense,” one employee said. “And then he’ll come to us and be like, ‘this one person says they can’t do this one thing on the platform,’ and then we have to run around chasing some outlier use case for one person. It doesn’t make sense.

The San Francisco headquarters of the micro-messaging service has a sad air about it. We are told that the standard greeting for people in the halls is “Where are you interviewing?” and “Where do you have offers?” Employees have to reserve the beds on the eighth floor in advance.

“People don’t even chat about work things anymore,” the employee said. “It’s just heartbreaking. I have more conversations with my friends on Signal and other messaging services. It was not unusual for the team channel to discuss what everybody did over the weekend. There was no more of that anymore.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/9/23593099/elon-musk-twitter-fires-engineer-declining-reach-ftc-concerns

Are all the best fires in a tech firm? Employees at the company: “Everything is going to get better,” said an employee

“When you’re asked a question, you run it through your head and say ‘what is the least fireable response I can have to this right now?’” one employee explained.

It is not true for everyone at the company. “There are a handful of true believers that are obviously just ass-kissers and brown-nosers who are trying to take advantage of the clear vacuum that exists,” that same employee says.)

“If Elon can learn how to put a bit more thought into some of the decisions, and fire from the hip a bit less, it might do some good,” the employee said. The areas where he does not know things are where those that know can take over.

At the same time, “he really doesn’t like to believe that there is anything in technology that he doesn’t know, and that’s frustrating,” the employee said. “You can’t be the smartest person in the room about everything, all the time.”

An employee stated that fear of not being able to find something else is the primary factor for most people. “I know for a fact that most of my team is doing hardcore interview prep and would jump at likely any opportunity to walk away.”

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/9/23593099/elon-musk-twitter-fires-engineer-declining-reach-ftc-concerns

Comments on Twitter Against Paying Advertising on Social Networks: Wells Fargo, Trump, Covid-19, and Associated Pseudoscalars

There are concerns about the way regulators will review recent changes. In agreement with the Federal Trade Commission, the company committed to following a series of steps before pushing changes, among them being conducting security and privacy reviews.

Wells Fargo stopped paid advertising on the social networking site but still uses it as a way to engage with customers. The other brands did not respond to a request for comment.

But the pushback continues. A coalition of civil society and civil rights groups renewed calls on Thursday for companies to join what they say is more than 500 advertisers who have stopped advertising on Twitter. A research report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate raised concerns about ads appearing next to toxic content from accounts that were previously banned.

In his first months as interim CEO, Musk loosened the rules on banned users, including former President Donald Trump. He also dissolved a third-party content oversight group and halted enforcement of its Covid-19 misinformation policy.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/10/tech/twitter-top-advertiser-decline/index.html

What is Happening Inside Twitter? A Comment on Musk’s “Unprecedented Facebook Adversarial Decline” and How HBO Made It

Even among the top advertisers, some have drastically reduced their ad spending. HBO, for example, was Twitter’s top advertiser in September, spending nearly $12 million on ads that month, but for the month of January (as of January 25), it spent just over $54,000. A request for comment from Warner Bros. Discovery was not immediately responded to.

The laid off engineering manager for monetization who reported directly to Musk appeared to suggest that there was a chance that the ads could not be improved in just a week. I’ve confirmed that Musk gave the aggressive deadline just before Kadluczka and others in the ads, consumer, and sales orgs were laid off last Friday.

Do you know more about what’s going on inside Twitter? I’d love to chat confidentially. You can reach me by email or on the Contact page of my website. We can create a secure thread on Signal.