There’s a lot of ongoing drama at the Twitter office since Elon Musk took over the company and changes have already started showing. Since Musk’s takeover, the social media platform has already undergone changes from firing a major portion of the existing workforce to adding features to the app such as the revamped Twitter Blue subscription. Here’s an update as to what’s exactly happening.
Twitter Blue at $8 is official and is here to stay
As it was reported earlier this week, Twitter Blue has been revamped and now comes at a higher price. However, it also brings more features alongside such as the blue verified badge, half as less ads, no ad-free articles and more.
The change hasn’t been received well by majority of the users who are questioning the authenticity of the whole feature and other privacy-related concerns, but Musk doesn’t want to pay heed to any of that. While people have already started taking unfair advantage of the feature on the platform, it seems like the company is being strict with its rules. This is because an account has already been suspended due to impersonating Elon Musk himself.
Musk also believes that widespread verification will democratise journalism and empower the voice of the people. However, despite the justifications from Tesla & SpaceX owner, majority doesn’t approve of the new verified badge being a part of Twitter Blue. A bunch of people aren’t happy with the decision including US politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In a reply to her take on the move, Musk said that her feedback was appreciated but she anyways has to pay $8.
In a reply to Alexandria’s criticism, hollywood actor Mark Ruffalo also told Musk to ”hand over the keys” for Twitter to someone else and continue running Tesla & SpaceX. Musk was quick to deny the US politician’s claim and tell Ruffalo that ”not everything which she says is accurate”. Author Stephen King also doesn’t like what Elon is doing with Twitter.
In a reply, Elon says that it has to pay the bills somehow and it cannot entirely rely on advertisers. According to him, this is also the only way to defeat the trolls and bots on the platform.
Elon Musk seems to belong to a different breed of CEOs who they take everything into their own hands quite literally. Usually, CEOs of big organisations do not engage with people but here, Elon is ready to answer everyone’s queries and on Twitter itself, the platform he owns.
While this is appreciated, it also seems to be chaotic because there’s some or the other statement coming out every day and not everyone is able to keep a follow-up. Whether this will be a successful move or not, only time will tell.
The new Twitter Blue subscription is already rolling out to iOS users in countries including the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. However, an account claiming to be that of a Twitter “early stage products” employee says that the new Blue subscription plan isn’t live yet. Some users are able to see the new feature because the company is testing and pushing changes in real-time.
For India, Musk says that the subscription could arrive under a month’s time, hopefully. He didn’t mention as to when regions apart from India would receive the feature. In other words, we should be getting the Blue subscription in India before the end of the year.
Impersonating without Parody Warning may get your account suspended permanently
Elon Musk says that, ”Going forward, any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying “parody” will be permanently suspended. ”Previously, we issued a warning before the suspension, but now that we are rolling out widespread verification, there will be no warning. This will be clearly identified as a condition for signing up to Twitter Blue,” he further tweeted.
He also says that this will be shown as a condition while signing up to Twitter. Moreover, any name change at all will also cause you to lose your checkmark temporarily. We suspect this is being done with security reasons in mind.
However, with a ’Parody’ tag alongside your name, does it mean you can post any type of content? No, because Twitter has a set of rules as per which “you may not engage in the targeted harassment of someone, or incite other people to do so”. Musk says that these rules will keep evolving.
Twitter laid off half of its workforce due to losses
Next, with Musk taking over, Twitter fired over half of its workforce. Tweets by the staff of the social media company said teams responsible for communications, content curation, human rights, machine learning ethics, and product and engineering teams were the ones that have been removed.
“Unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day,” Musk tweeted about the layoffs, while adding that everyone affected was offered three months of severance pay.
To this, former Twitter CEO Jack apologised to the employees as he realises that many in the current situation would be angry with him as owns the responsibility for why all this happened. However, does this apology mean that Jack approves of the Elon’s move to lay off half the workforce?
Long-Form Text Sharing feature in works
Elon Musk then announced via his platform that it will soon allow users to add long-form text to their tweets. Taking to Twitter, Musk said, “Twitter will soon add ability to attach long-form text to tweets, ending absurdity of notepad screenshots”.
This should mean that you will be able to post longer content alongside Tweets. Apart from this, he further added that it will be followed by creator monetisation for all forms of content.
With the introduction of long form content, it is believed that Twitter would lose its originality and soul which were the short-form text, at the end of the day. Every post on Twitter is shared as a snippet and while most of the people do not have time, reading information on Twitter has been time-saving for many.
Twitter won’t give up on its content moderation policies
With so much going on at the company, Elon Musk reassures it users that the platform won’t give up on its content moderation policies. “We have actually seen hateful speech at times this week decline below our prior norms, contrary to what you may read in the press”, said Musk.
“While we said goodbye to incredibly talented friends and colleagues yesterday, our core moderation capabilities remain in place,” Yoel Roth, Twitter’s Head of Safety & Integrity, asserted in a thread of Tweets.
“Last week, for security reasons, we restricted access to our internal tools for some users, including some members of my team. Most of the 2,000+ content moderators working on front-line review were not impacted, and access will be fully restored in the coming days.”
With Elon’s shaky start with Twitter, it isn’t clear as to where things are headed, the key characteristic here being ’uncertainty’ in Musk’s move. With him as CEO, Twitter can rise up or fall down in an instant and all of it depends on where he plans to take the platform in the future. He aims to make Twitter the most accurate source of information in the world for users but will he succeed?