It seems that the name “Elon Musk” is impossible not to bring up when talking about Twitter these days. Having acquired ownership of the platform for a record deal of nearly $44 billion on October 27, 2022, most of the general public was curious to see where Musk would take the social media platform next and what he had in mind to elevate the company.
The anticipation was short-lived, however, as Musk was quick to take action and make some controversial changes at Twitter Inc. With new developments regarding Musk's leadership at Twitter appearing in headlines every few days, the subject piqued my interest and I figured it would be interesting to take a deep dive into the evolution of Twitter since Elon Musk's takeover, the effectiveness of his methods, and what the future of Twitter entails.
Caging the bird
The first major course of action after Musk's takeover was undoubtedly the announcement of a new version of Twitter Blue. Twitter Blue is a tool that allows users to have access to a few exclusive features, which now include having a verified profile with the signature Twitter “blue” checkmark next to subscribers' accounts in exchange for $8 a month.
This feature became a major topic of discourse, with a large majority of users expressing their criticisms of the feature, and as an avid Twitter user, I find some of these criticisms valid.
Firstly, one of the most important purposes served by the Twitter verification badge is setting apart legitimate public interest accounts such as celebrities, brands, politicians, news and information accounts, etc. from regular accounts and impersonators. When the checkmark becomes purchasable, anyone can have easy access to it and it takes away from the value of having the verification badge in the first place.
Impersonation can also become easier as people could change their display names to tweet as other public figures, a phenomenon that already occurred within the first few weeks of the introduction of this Twitter Blue update and led to the quick spread of misinformation across the platform. To avoid this phenomenon, Twitter has since added notes to verified profiles where upon clicking on the checkmark, the website will tell you whether the account is verified for being a prominent figure, or by purchasing Twitter Blue.
This brings us back to square one and leads me to wonder: If people can tell whether one earned the checkmark organically or paid for it, what exactly, from a consumer's standpoint, is the point of purchasing the blue check in the first place? It seems as though most Twitter users were also unable to see the merit in this tool as the Twitter Blue subscriptions so far have been far behind what Musk is likely aiming for, tallying up to a total of only 290,000 worldwide subscriptions as of mid-January, according to reports by The Information.
Money flies away
Considering this data, this would add $27.8 million to the annual subscription revenue, which does not even begin to cover the $12.5bn in loans that Musk required to help pay the hefty fee for his Twitter takeover. If Musk is aiming to cover at least $1bn of his loan per year through the annual subscription revenue, he would require 10.4m Twitter Blue subscriptions, of which he is currently 10.1m subscriptions short.
Musk, however, has only doubled down on his decision by announcing that he will now proceed to remove “legacy blue checks” as in verification badges that were obtained by users without paying for Twitter Blue. Therefore, only subscribers paying for the checkmark will be able to retain their verification status, disregarding the fact that this could promote the spread of more misinformation and impersonation on the platform.
Along with misinformation, there have been reports of increased hate speech and offensive content on the site. Musk has labelled himself a "free speech absolutist," and has modified Twitter's content moderation system to be more lenient towards “diverse views,” which many believe has enabled more tolerance for hate speech. As a consequence of this, it has been reported that Twitter lost quite a few users after Musk's takeover, including a good number of celebrities such as Gigi Hadid, Elton John, Jim Carrey, etc.
In fact, data from Insider Intelligence shows that Twitter is predicted to lose almost 30 million users within the next two years, subsequent to Musk's takeover. Additionally, several high-profile brands such as Volkswagen, Audi, and Pfizer discontinued advertising on the platform due to skepticism over Musk's content moderation plans.
This is a concern because most of Twitter's revenue in the past has been generated from ad revenue (almost 90% as of 2021) and losing some of its major advertisers is likely to affect the financial figures that Musk may be aiming for, especially considering that Twitter Blue hasn't quite filled up that gap yet.
Since Musk has been very vocal about how his plan focuses on increasing Twitter's annual revenue, this exodus of advertisers and its alternative -- the $8 version of Twitter Blue --not having taken off may put a temporary dent in his plans, perhaps encouraging him to try different methods.
Flying the coop
The next major incident that followed was the mass firing of employees which made headlines for weeks. In November 2022, Elon Musk fired nearly half of the staff at Twitter, with others resigning due to Musk's rigorous Twitter 2.0 program, leaving only 1,300 of the original 7,500 employees prior to his takeover.
While this did cut down some of the company's costs, it left them massively understaffed, leading to the remaining staff having to work irregular hours and endure difficult working conditions -- with some staff members even reported to be sleeping in the office. In retaliation to Musk's tough leadership, several anti-Elon Musk messages were then projected on the San Francisco Twitter headquarters, and former staff members claimed that Twitter would go down within a week due to understaffing.
While the site survived and has remained functional, and cutting down on labor costs may be beneficial in the short term, this move might just be problematic in the long term.
Firstly, this massive public spectacle most likely did not do much to reform the company's image to advertisers and the media. Moreover, apart from the obvious overworking and unfavorable working conditions of the employees, the low staff count might also be a concern as a lot of designated workers with specific roles in the company were laid off, and with them gone, it is no doubt difficult for the few remaining employees to tackle the same amount of workload and pressure by themselves, especially when it comes to the speed at which problems on Twitter are dealt with.
Earlier, Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence said: "If Musk manages to stave off service issues and potential outages, fix the platform's content moderation problems, and integrate new services into the app to drive revenue, he may be still able to reverse the course of the user drain."
Unfortunately, this has not been the case as Twitter has faced quite a few outages, with the site being down earlier in December and then going down three times within the month of February (one being during the time of writing this article) causing users to take to social media to express their frustrations.
This, of course, is not very promising if the company aims to prevent the predicted user drain, as outages becoming more frequent makes the site difficult to navigate. Furthermore, there have been complaints of a decline in the Twitter algorithm as users reported that they were seeing too many tweets from “suggested accounts” instead of accounts they followed and also that they were seeing all of Musk's tweets, which was reported to be a result of the platform boosting his tweets.
Musk later addressed this saying that the service was experimenting with a “For You” tab and has mostly reversed these changes since.
Another notable controversy was when journalists from the New York Times, CNN, and the Washington Post were cut off from the platform in December 2022. The story began when a number of journalists' accounts were suspended from the platform due to allegedly disclosing the location of Musk's private jet.
A few of the suspended journalists then took to Twitter Spaces, the platform's live audio service, which was one of the few features they were still able to access despite the suspension. Musk later joined in on the conversation and defended his decision, saying that “everyone's going to be treated the same … you're not special because you're a journalist” on Twitter.
The journalists however argued that they were not responsible for posting any real-time flight data but the Twitter CEO seemed uninterested in addressing their claims as he left the conversation, which was followed by Twitter Spaces being suspended. This led to public outrage from many journalists and media organizations, and from a journalist's perspective, some of this criticism is reasonable.
One of the key requirements for the practice of authentic journalism is that journalists must be allowed freedom of speech and the press in order to provide the unfiltered, fair, and honest truth. Considering that Elon Musk has often labelled himself an advocate for free speech and a massive part of his Twitter campaign has been about making Twitter a place of transparency where people will be allowed to practice freedom of speech (hence his new content moderation policies which sparked much debate), taking away the very platform that allows journalists to raise their concerns over his actions can be perceived a tad bit hypocritical.
European Commission Vice President Vera Jourova went on to release a strongly worded statement on Twitter saying: “News about arbitrary suspension of journalists on Twitter is worrying. There are red lines. And sanctions, soon.”
Ruling the roost
The final nail in the coffin came in the form of a Twitter poll hosted by none other than Elon Musk himself. On December 18, Musk tweeted out a poll on Twitter that read “Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll.” In a shocking turn of events, the majority voted in favour of Musk stepping down as CEO, with approximately 57.5% votes for Yes and 42.5% for No, out of the 17.5 million users who participated.
While the results were already unfavourable for Musk, it's what followed that created more backlash for him. After the results of the poll came in, Musk backtracked, claiming that the verdict had been skewed by fake accounts. He also tweeted that only users paying for a Twitter Blue subscription should be able to vote in polls to contribute to making major decisions regarding Twitter. This was a particularly strange response considering he initiated the poll in the first place, and gave users the platform to make this decision for him, explicitly stating in his tweet that he will abide by poll results. So for him to give users this platform to vote, then go back on his words and strip them away of it, and then single out Twitter Blue subscribers may not have been the best course of action.
Elon Musk later stated that he would resign as CEO once he finds someone “foolish enough” to take the job after which he will only be running the software and servers teams, and he remains CEO of Twitter to date. Recently, Musk suggested that the end of 2023 would be a more suitable time for him to resign as CEO as he anticipates that Twitter will be stable by then, although with the growing tally of controversies and inconsistencies since his takeover, not to mention his ambitious financial targets which haven't quite been reached yet, this goal might prove challenging for the tech mogul to meet within such a short period of time.
Shades of blue
Of course, it hasn't been all trouble since Musk's takeover, some of the recent changes made to the platform have been met with a positive response as well. As extreme as Musk's firing spree was, it did help cut a lot of the labour costs of the company which could in turn help them have a better revenue-cost ratio, therefore increasing profit. Moreover, the latest data published by Twitter's planning tools shows that ads on the platform reach nearly 550 million users per month, which is 120 million more than the figures reported by the same source this time last year, so there has been a significant upward trend in ad audience this year.
Musk has also hinted at the introduction of some new features for the site such as a 4,000-character limit per tweet which would make it easier for users to fit all their thoughts into a single tweet instead of having to divide them up into multiple tweets, and a feature that allows one to save videos from Twitter directly without requiring third party apps.
Both of these ideas earned mostly positive responses from Twitter users.
Elon Musk has also made it a point to crack down on bots and clear up spam, inactive, and scam accounts on Twitter as much as possible. This could be a helpful change as some spam bots tend to be harmful and engage in financial scams with Twitter users. If Musk successfully clears up fraudulent bots and only allows bots following Twitter rules and guidelines to remain on the platform, it would create a much safer environment on Twitter for all users.
Some of these changes indicate that there is potential for positive change at Twitter, it's just overshadowed by the string of controversies that have been creating headlines ever since Elon Musk's takeover. While the next step for Twitter remains a mystery to us, regardless of whether Musk or a new CEO is looking over the company, they should focus on avoiding further controversial moves and dedicate time towards listening to their audiences and catering to their needs, preferably while also granting their employees suitable working hours and conditions.
Bird watching
Twitter's biggest asset is the nature of the platform which allows users to easily share their thoughts and opinions, and the company should make the best use of that by determining what the general userbase wants and enacting changes that the majority is in favour of.
User satisfaction along with working on the major technical issues such as reducing the frequency of outages, content limit, catering the algorithm towards users according to their preferences, acting quickly and strongly regarding matters of hate speech, the spread of misinformation, cyberbullying, doxxing, etc, these would all be fundamental in reversing a possible user drain and making Twitter a more user-friendly, easy-to-navigate and helpful app.
Having been a Twitter user for quite a few years now, I find this app to be one of my favourite social media platforms due to its unique design and nature, and inclusive community. Twitter has something special that no other app has, the design allows one to share thoughts and information in a format that most of its contemporaries do not possess and to let go of that in an attempt to follow trends and imitate what other apps are doing would be a terrible waste.
I believe it is essential for them to take a pause instead of jumping into the next controversial decision that leaves users discontented, and rather focus on solving the existing issues that users have been voicing for years. Consumers are the backbone of the site and providing them with good service is the best way for the company to retain its quality and goodwill, which could then open more doors for them.
Bidisha Roy is an intern and contributor to the Dhaka Tribune.