Since taking over as Twitter CEO in October, Elon Musk has made significant changes—and not every change has been well received.
Key Details
- “For someone on the inside, it’s like a building where all the pieces are on fire,” a Twitter employee told BBC.
- The same employee reported that the teams in charge of creating and maintaining the social-media platform’s security features had been fired.
- He added that the company is short-staffed, and teams are taking on extra work outside their division.
- “A totally new person, without the expertise, is doing what used to be done by more than 20 people,” the employee says. “That leaves room for much more risk, many more possibilities of things that can go wrong.”
Why it’s news
Musk quickly began working on a staffing overhaul after acquiring Twitter last year. This included firing scores of employees while others left voluntarily. Those who stayed reported working longer hours and other difficult working conditions, Fortune reports.
Features that monitored Twitter’s content and watched for bots, trolls, and flake accounts have largely been disbanded. Content safety monitors are largely unmanned, Fortune reports.
Lisa Jennings Young, former head of content design at Twitter, explained that features like the “nudge” were no more. Jennings Young’s team created the nudge, which told users if the content they were about to publish included language that could be considered hateful or triggering.
Now that Jennings Young’s team is no longer at Twitter, features like the nudge are falling by the wayside.
“Overall 60% of users deleted or edited their reply when given a chance through the nudge,” says Jennings Young. “There’s no one there to work on that at this time.”
The anonymous employee who spoke to BBC also reported that Musk constantly works with two bodyguards beside him while in the Twitter office.
Since Musk’s acquisition, Twitter has reportedly declined in revenue and lost hundreds of advertisers. In the fourth quarter, Twitter’s revenue fell 35%, Fortune reports. Twitter no longer publicly reports its earnings, but its last report in the second quarter of 2022 found that Twitter’s revenue was $1.18 billion.