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| Musk admits Twitter's profits are falling and explains why |
Twitter's new owner, Elon Musk, said on Friday that the company's revenue had fallen as advertisers stopped advertising on the social media platform.
In a tweet on his official Twitter account, the billionaire Musk accused activist groups of bullying advertisers and said that Twitter had not changed its content modification policy, adding that the company did so to meet consumer demand to satisfy militants.
Musk, who also runs electric car maker Tesla and SpaceX, did not explain the drop in Twitter's revenue or provide evidence that it was caused by pressure from activist groups on advertisers.
Echoing his comments in an interview at Barron's Investment Conference today, Musk said, "We're not making any changes to our operations," and added, "We're doing everything we can to please them, but to no avail." So this is a serious problem. Honestly, I think this is an attack on the First Amendment.
Musk is referring to the original First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which forbids the creation of laws prohibiting the establishment of religion, interfering with freedom of belief, restricting freedom of speech, violating freedom of the press, and interfering with the right. Peaceful assembly, or petitioning the government to resolve grievances is prohibited. Note that the First Amendment was one of the ten other amendments passed in 1791.
Over the past few days, a number of companies have announced that they will pause their ads on Twitter to see how things work under Musk's ownership. Companies including automaker General Motors and Audi, as well as food giant General Mills, halted advertising on Twitter after Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion on October 28. Advertising agency IPG has advised its clients to pause advertising on Twitter.
Twitter told its employees on Thursday that it will start laying off many of them, according to several outlets, while Reuters quoted employees as saying that the content moderation unit was also affected by the layoffs.