To the most casual Twitter user – someone who perhaps uses it just to keep up with friends, shops, and ‘weird medieval guys’ – it might look like nothing has changed. Twitter still has the same design it always did, the site still has its verified users with their checkmarks, the tweets still flow, and Donald Trump is still not posting.
Behind the scenes, however, almost everything has changed. All of Twitter’s leadership and most of its staff are gone, replaced primarily by Elon Musk in the first case and by nobody in the latter. The company’s content moderation rules have been weakened and almost all of the people previously banned are now coming back. Advertisers are avoiding it amid fears that their sponsored posts could appear alongside more controversial ones. There have been warnings that the site could break.
That tension between everything changing and nothing has marked the whole of Elon Musk’s first month at Twitter. He, his supporters and his enemies have all forecast that the site could be about to fall apart, and make the world worst with it. But the site largely remains the same. Whatever you predicted would happen to Twitter when Musk took over – whether the changes would be big, small, bad or good – you would be both right and wrong at the same time.
Perhaps the most defining post in Twitter’s history was posted 10 years ago, by an account then thought to be a robot. “Everything happens so much,” the account @Horse_ebooks wrote. It has never been more true since Elon Musk took over the company.
But what has actually happened in the month since Elon Musk took over Twitter? And what does it suggest about where it is going?
The story of Musk’s takeover of Twitter could be traced back to June 2009, when he made the account that would go on to be followed by 120 million people at the time of posting. Back then, Twitter was still young: each day, people posted less than a tenth of the tweets they do today, the site regularly broke, and it was still largely a source of curiosity rather than a real force in the world.
Musk’s first tweet came a year after he joined. With its focus on impersonation, it fit with one of Musk’s central concerns 12 years later, when he took over the company.
Musk’s posts continued. As the year’s went by, he built up a vast following for his tweets on a range of topics: some seriously promoting his business interests or his views on world affairs, others re-posting often crude internet humour. Some were a combination of all three, as when his Boring Company tunnel-digging startup started selling “burnt hair” perfume.
He was self-confessedly obsessed with the platform. “Some people use their hair to express themselves, I use Twitter,” he wrote, in just one of a series of posts and remarks about how much he enjoyed using the platform.
All through those years, Mr Musk occasionally expressed an interest in owning Twitter. In 2017, for instance, he posted “I love Twitter” – to which another user responded suggesting he should buy it, leading Mr Musk to ask “How much is it?”
In recent years, those posts became more common, along with expressions of concern about the future of the platform. One of his key concerns was the number of bots – many of which responded to his tweets using fake accounts that were designed to look like him, in an attempt to trick people into crypto scams. Those complaints became linked with his desire to buy the company.
The real story of the takeover began in January, 2022, however, when Musk started buying up the company’s stock. He initially did so quietly, using the public market to increase his holding in a way that passed without notice.
Then, in April, he announced that he had bought a 9.2 per cent holding in Twitter, and had become its largest shareholder. He was invited to join the company’s board, accepted, and then backed out – and offered to buy the company entirely.
On 14 April, that offer to buy Twitter arrived – announced, fittingly, in a tweet from Musk’s account. Over the months that followed, Musk would try to pull out of the deal, but after months of attempted escapes it became clear the expensive legal process would force him to buy it anyway.
At the end of October, Musk bought the company, declared him self “Chief Twit”, dismissed its management and dissolved the board, established a “war room” from which he would change the company, and started doing so. On 28 October, he sent his first post after taking over Twitter.
Since then, Musk’s attempts at stamping his mark on Twitter have begun. From that war room, he began an assault on much of what Twitter’s old and maligned management had left behind: its content moderation rules, its employees, the technical underpinnings of the app and more.
The first major decision was to cut Twitter’s workforce, roughly in half. They had been widely rumoured ahead of Musk’s takeover, but reports of layoffs came just hours after it actually happened.
Vast numbers of Twitter staff began to be fired, and in some cases quit, the company – even before the first wave of departures was over, the majority of the company’s employees were gone. That included major teams that seem to have gone entirely, and many of the cuts were in parts of the business away from its engineering teams, such as communications and content moderation.
Straight away, Twitter engineers started warning that the cuts to the teams that ensure the site remains up and reliable would mean that the site could start breaking. In its first hours, it did start behaving oddly – and such reports have continued throughout Musk’s time at Twitter, though it is yet to stop working entirely.
Those staff that remained were told they needed to work long and intense hours to keep the company going, or face layoffs. A photo posted on Twitter seemed to show one of its employees sleeping on the floor, and Musk too said that he would be staying at the company until it was fixed.
It was a tone that had marked Musk’s time as the leader of his other companies, such as SpaceX and Tesla. Staff were asked to commit to “hardcore” working conditions if they wanted to work there – or stop doing so. (Notably, at those other companies, Musk has a bigger management team to help soften some of those demands; SpaceX’s chief operations officer Gwynne Shotwell has been credited with actually working through Musk’s demands.)
At the same time as engineers were being laid off, they were also being asked to introduce Musk’s planned new features. Once again they did so, at the threat of being sacked if their work and efficiency wasn’t intense enough.
On 9 November, the first of those big features started to rollout. Users could pay $8 to get their own verification checkmark, Musk announced. Until then, the checkmark had been intended to show that an account had been confirmed as really representing who it claimed; after the new feature was introduced, however, anyone could pay a fee to have their account look real.
And many did. One claimed to be the official Nintendo account and posted a vulgar picture of Mario that remained on the site for hours; another dressed their account up as pharmaceutical firm Eli Lilly, posted that “insulin is free now”, and triggered real movements in the financial markets.
Twitter struggled to contain the chaos: one of the more prominent attempts was rolling out a new black “official” badge that did the same as the old verified one, and then turning it back off in a few hours. Two days later, Twitter and Musk admitted temporary defeat: on 11 November, the paid verification was turned off until it could be fixed.
The difficulty with verification continues, even a month into Musk’s reign. He has tried a whole of fixes, from requiring parody accounts to write “parody” in their name to trying different kinds of verified checkmark, but none of them have yet worked with enough confidence to bring back the paid verification feature.
That chaos – as well as the general sense of uncertainty around the company – led to warnings from advertisers that it could be “high-risk” to continue promoting posts on the account. Advertisers represent almost all of Twitter’s revenue.
Musk’s response was to court advertisers while also suggesting that they were deserting because of the actions of activists. But the verification chaos was also the result of an attempt to make Twitter less dependent on advertising – by bringing new sources of revenue – and so he has pushed on with it, even if it is yet to actually work.
At the same time, he has attempted to build its reputation. He claimed, on Twitter, that the site was the “biggest click driver on the internet by far”, a claim that is not true. He has also focused on other big numbers, such as the record users on the platform, its continuing growth and its success during events such as the World Cup.
Some of those new users may be the old users that Musk has let back on the platform. On 18 November, he announced “Freedom Friday”, and restored a range of accounts that had been previously banned, many of them for transphobic tweets. He also brought back Donald Trump’s account, banned amid fears he could use it to foment deadly protest in the wake of the Capitol Riots, though the former president has still not actually posted.
They will be followed by many more. Days after “Freedom Friday”, Musk ran a poll asking whether he should declare a “general amnesty” for banned accounts, letting them back so long as they had not broken the law or engaged in flagrant spam. At the same time, he began to post yet more about the “culture war” and the importance of freedom of speech.
Musk’s focus is on allowing freedom of speech but not “freedom of reach”, he has stressed, with posts that include hateful or other problematic content made harder for other users to find. That appears to be an attempt to remove some content moderation while keeping advertisers happy. It has led to many more hateful posts on the site, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which says that Twitter is “becoming more dangerous than ever”.
Twitter however claims that the changes are working, and that the “impressions” on posts with hateful speech are down. Musk made the claim amid a new focus on “Twitter 2.0” – which he laid out in a presentation that also said that signups are at an all-time high, impersonation is beginning to fall, and that Twitter would go on to beat Amazon and TikTok by becoming the “everything app”. (The features promised in his plan had been previously tried by Twitter engineers, according to researcher Jane Manchun Wong, who found work on all the newly announced updates had been happening years ago.)
In the weeks since, Musk’s focus at Twitter has bounced rapidly. His interests can be tracked on his Twitter account, which has also featured personal posts such as his collections of guns and Diet Coke on his bedside. He is tweeting more than ever, about everything from content moderation to new features for Twitter.
But many of the issues he has aimed to address have changed little. Generally, Musk is trying to get staff to work harder, to introduce new features, to find ways of getting more money for the beleaguered company or to make changes to its content moderation rules and systems.
The solutions to those issues change every day. But the problems that Musk is focused on are always much the same – and they are largely the same as those that troubled Twitter long before he took it over.
As such, the near future of Musk’s Twitter looks a lot like it always has: trying to turn the intense interest of its users and its high-profile status into a better product. Whether you begin the story at the founding of Twitter, at Musk registering his Twitter account, or when the billionaire and the company finally came together a month ago, the story is much the same.
Those problems are therefore likely to stay the same. But looking to the future it may be the solutions that change, and often by the day, as Twitter’s new owner tries to find a way to make the company work the way he wants. Musk wants it to be the everything app – and everything, as Twitter taught us, happens so much.
Kaynak: briturkish.com
