TWITTER´S DEBACLE: THE CIRCUS PLAY KEEPS ROLLING! (PART 2)
If you want to know the full story and the overall market analysis make sure to check PART 1: The Twitter Transition!
Elon Musk´s tweet on December 10th, 2022 tweet raises even more concerns than the platform transition and aftermath. Since the negotiation process began, it appears that the new owner has been downsizing Twitter’s previous history, process, management, and evolution. This is a behavior a wise leader might not take.
“Twitter is both a social media company and a crime scene.”
With this kind of comment one would ask why he bought it in the first place. Maybe Musk thinks he is making a better company, but the truth is, many feel the changes since he took over are doubtful.
The only certainty we can have is that Musk is making A LOT of changes and disclosures. Only time will tell how the new updates will turn out.
Among the changes, there is a political advertising relaxation: Back in 2019, Twitter banned all political advertising. Earlier in January 2023, Twitter informed the public they were easing their ad policy and expanding their political advertising.
Among the disclosure: It seems Elon is also unveiling Twitter’s darkest secrets. “Twitter is working on a software update that will show your true account status, so you know clearly if you’ve been shadowbanned, the reason why and how to appeal,” he wrote on the social media platform on December 8th, 2022.
The Government Demands
Less than a week after 2022 was over, Musk disclosed that the US Government was demanding him to suspend around 250,000 Twitter accounts including those from journalists and Canadian officials.
Source: Twitter
Let’s Sell All We Can and Shut Down Some More Things
We all know 2022 basically hit us with all it had. It seems Twitter was not the exception to the rule. Musk decided to auction kitchen appliances and even furniture online. The company spends around $13 million a year only on food for one of its offices worldwide and more than $400 per meal for the staff, according to Musk.
“There are more people preparing breakfast than eating breakfast. They don’t even bother serving dinner, because there is no one in the building,” he tweeted.
On the other hand, on Christmas Eve, Misk flew over to Sacramento, California to shut down
some servers of the computing storage facilities. This was a drastic move Musk made to improve Twitter’s finances.
Employees Could Spend the Night in Twitter Offices
Elon Musk has turned a series of small rooms inside Twitter San Francisco offices into bedrooms for tired employees. There are between 4 and 8 rooms with beds per floor. Reports said that this new change kickstarted by Musk is being presumed as a move to make “hardcore” employees comfortable as they can stay and work overnight at the office.
Opinions on the matter differ:
“People are already putting in late nights, so it makes sense to an extent,” a source said.
“It’s not a good look,” staffers said. “It’s yet another unspoken sign of disrespect. There is no discussion. Just like, beds showed up.”
“We investigate all complaints. We need to make sure the building is being used as intended,” Patrick Hannan, communications director for the San Francisco Department of Building Inspection told Insider by email. “There are different building code requirements for residential buildings, including those used for short-term stays. These codes make sure people are using spaces safely. Everyone in San Francisco deserves a safe place to live, work, play and sleep and no one is above the law.”
This room update might respond to employees’ long schedules, and an increase in overtime, and it seems like a measure to prevent employees to go home.
The Outage
On December 2022 Twitter suffered an outrage affecting thousands of people by preventing them from accessing the social media platform. Downdetector, a site that identifies outages in the web reported that during the peak of the attack, there were more than 10,000 users affected only within the US.
During the Outage users trying to access via desktop or mobile could not log in or handle notifications. When trying to do so they were directed to a pop-up message “Something went wrong, but don’t worry because it wasn’t your fault. Let’s try once again.”The Outrage happened only 2 months after Musk took over the company.
Source: Twitter
After the event, the #TwitterDown become viral in what platform and a lot of fo memes began to flood.
Aside from this reports say there was a leak of partial data of 400 million Twitter users. Data from celebrities, politicians, and other relevant public figures were published by an alleged cybercriminal at the end of December 2022.
According to The Guardian, “The hacker argued the data had been “scraped” from Twitter via a “vulnerability” in the site, and “includes emails and phone numbers of celebrities, politicians, companies, normal users, and a lot of OG and special usernames”.”
Back in August 2022 Twitter recognized a vulnerability in its API system which allowed people to find out e-mail addresses and phone numbers associated with some accounts.
Source: Twitter
The Platform Updates
The Blue Checkmark
The Social Media platform lets its users buy Twitter Blue subscriptions and access additional features starting on December 12th, 2022. This is a significant change, as the company previously only provided the blue checkmark to celebrities, governmental organizations, verified journalists, and businesses.
The service will cost $8 a month for web and Android users and $11 a month for iPhone users. Subscribers will see fewer ads, would post longer videos and their tweets will have more visibility.
When asked about price increases Esther Crawford, the product manager at Twitter replied: “you’ll get a price increase notification and can choose to remain a subscriber on iOS or switch to the web –it will be entirely up to you.”
Remember that by the time Musk allowed the Blue Checkmark again a few weeks back Twitter users started seeing fake verified accounts? Well, to prevent this from happening again the social media company decided to implement phone verification.
Esther Crawford said, “We’ve added a review step before applying a blue checkmark to an account as one of our new steps to combat impersonation (which is against the Twitter Rules).” However, she did clarify it will not be an ID verification.
Character Limit Increase
Elon Musk has confirmed the number of characters will be increased on the platform from 280 to 4.000. This change presented a pain for the company as one of its differentials with other platforms is to provide fast info and news.
In response, the company decided to implement “Community Notes”. Twitter said “Community Notes aims to create a better-informed world, by empowering people on Twitter to collaboratively add helpful notes to Tweets that might be misleading.”
According to the platform, “Contributors can leave notes on any Tweet and if enough contributors from different points of view rate that note as helpful, the note will be publicly shown on a Tweet.” When people are scrolling through the feed they can see tweets with a Community Notes card and note, and rate how helpful they think the note is.
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