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| What does the future of Twitter look like under Musk? |
Employees and advertisers keep talking to Elon Musk about the dangers of the changes he's making on the Twitter platform, but he doesn't listen, so much so that chaos has become so much the headline in his administration that many are starting to think. about the future of the platform.
On Friday, after a day of confusion and fraud on the platform, Twitter suspended new sign-ups for its new $8-per-month Twitter Blue verification service, which launched earlier this week.
Twitter Blue is available as a paid subscription that provides a blue authentication tab and access to certain features, but does not include authentication. The policy of giving every account a blue verification badge has led to accounts of celebrities, government officials, and corporations being impersonated. The resulting chaos caused advertisers to walk away, believing the platform would soon collapse.
The company also made no announcement regarding the resumption of service and new terms; Left without a publicity team following Musk's mass layoffs, Musk responded to a Twitter user's question on Saturday, saying, "Maybe recording will continue through the end of this week.
Musk tweeted today that the Twitter Blue relaunch date is November 29th.
Musk ignored an internal warning about Twitter Blue:
Days before the account verification service launched on November 9, the company's trust and security team created a seven-page list of recommendations designed to help Musk avoid the most obvious and common pitfalls of his lists with devastating consequences. The document obtained by Platformer predicted some of the following events with amazing accuracy:
Overzealous scammers may be willing to pay to use identity verification to gain traction, thus putting the platform at risk.
The identities of CEOs, government officials, celebrities, and corporations pose a risk on the platform.
Removing the authentication sticker from an old verified account can cause confusion and loss of trust of high level users.
When the document was released in the company on November 1, Musk had a subscription of $19.99 per month; Later, after discussing it with author Stephen King via tweet, he lowered the cost to $8.
But the move increases the risk of fraud, as the desire to mock brands and government officials becomes an incentive to sign up for the $8 service.
All predictions made by the Trust and Safety team have already come true. When the user received an $8 blue checkmark on the account, some users changed their personal accounts to pretend to be large companies and public figures, and some users including some people impersonating Musk himself.
A user identifying himself as Eli Lilly, an American global pharmaceutical company, posted a tweet that read: Insulin is now free. It took Twitter about six hours to delete the tweet about the company's stock.
Meanwhile, others have posted inappropriate images on behalf of companies like Coca-Cola and Nintendo; Twitter enabled a new gray verification flag for accounts that pay for the new service to distinguish them from verified accounts that previously received a verification card, and then removed it as well.
Director of Product Management Esther Crawford announced in a tweet on November 9 that accounts verified with a blue verification badge will receive an official designation at launch for account identification.
However, this designation is not for sale and not all pre-verified accounts get it, only government accounts, corporations, business partners, mainstream media, publishers and select public figures.
The team identified several other risks that the current Twitter management still has to resolve, such as: ?
In addition, the team revealed some features that could make the service more secure and easy to use, but most of them were not approved by management.
Musk and his attorney, Alex Spiro, have reviewed the document, and while Crawford sympathized with many of the concerns in the document, the source said, "I refused to implement anything that would delay the filing," suggested on Twitter Blue. Despite the warnings, plans to launch the service continue!
Termination of employees under contract with Twitter:
Moreover, the policy of layoffs continues, and a week after laying off as much as half of the company's workforce, Musk unleashed a massive second wave of mass layoffs, but this time against the company's contract workers.
Sources say Musk fired 4,400 of the 5,500 contractors, or up to 80% of the contractors, without warning. These layoffs will have a significant impact on the content moderation department and the infrastructure services that keep the site running.
Complete Twitter codebase freeze:
On Monday morning, Musk called an emergency meeting of Twitter's engineers, where he issued an order blocking any modifications to Twitter's products, a code freeze allowing engineers to commit to writing code without it on the platform's network for publication.
These freezes are usually done to reduce the risk of Twitter systems crashing or crashing, but this time engineers were told they couldn't write any code until further notice, according to an internal email from Platformer.
However, there will be exceptions when urgent changes need to be made to fix issues with the site, and as stated in the email, employees must have direct and explicit approval from the company's vice president, and in some cases Musk himself, to make that clear. Changes may occur.
This happened while Musk on Sunday spoke publicly about the quality of Twitter code, apologizing for the slowness of Twitter in many countries, and some engineers publicly spoke to him on Twitter that what he said was not true, and at the end of the year he entered the public day. Twitter engineer fired.
Another engineer commented, "As the former Chief Technology Officer for Twitter's major infrastructure, I can say this with confidence: This guy has no idea what he's talking about."
So far, no one knows exactly why Musk ordered the Twitter database freeze, but some have speculated that he feared employees destroying public property so badly because of the layoffs.
Because of this, many experts have warned of a possible outage for Twitter, urging users to download their data while it's available.
Advertisers opt out:
According to Eli Lilly, the day it launched Twitter Blue, impersonating and tweeting about insulin, the company paused all campaign advertising on Twitter, according to The Washington Post. Twitter millions of dollars in lost revenue.
The company is one of many major firms to halt advertising on Twitter in the past few days, with Volkswagen, General Motors, Pfizer, Audi and others pausing advertising on the platform and training and advising major advertising companies. Examples: Affiliates (Mediabrands), IPG, and Omnicom Media Group ask their customers to do the same.
The final result:
Large platforms often roll out disruptive changes slowly, testing them on a small group of users to see how they respond. Because it can never be sure of the behavior of millions of users.
But Musk took a different approach, even threatening employees to start the service if he told the engineers to roll out the new subscription plan within a week or they'd be fired. Then he orders a freeze on the platform's database because ads are the biggest source of revenue, and advertisers are pulling out like never before.
Everything on Twitter so far indicates that emotion and confusion are at the forefront of Elon Musk's decisions after he takes over the company, which undoubtedly presages a meltdown as critics predicted.