With Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, he has been under constant pressure to turn things around at one of the largest social media companies. Check out the latest developments so far.
On October 28, Elon Musk took over one of the world’s most influential social media platforms – Twitter. After completing his $44 billion acquisition, the world’s richest man acknowledged the takeover in a tweet, saying, “The bird is freed.” Since then, Musk has announced some significant changes, keeping employees, marketers, and users on the edge of their seats.
Here is a look at some of the developments since Musk assumed ownership:
Massive layoffs: Musk’s first move was to fire the top executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, and legal affairs and policy chief Vijaya Gadde. The company informed workers via email that they would find out if they had been laid off or not on Nov. 4. Approximately, 7,500 employees were let go. Following the layoffs, employees used Twitter to show their support for one another by tweeting the hashtag #OneTeam and blue heart emoticons to signify the platform’s blue bird logo.
Lawsuit: Some of the fired employees filed a class action suit in a San Francisco federal court against the social media platform. They claimed the company violated various labor laws by not providing advance notice of their dismissal and severance pay.
Halt on advertising: Around 90% of Twitter’s revenue comes from advertisers. But just a few days after the social media site was bought, some of the biggest companies, like General Mills and the Volkswagen Group, stopped advertising on Twitter so they could figure out what was going on.
Drop in revenue: As soon as a number of advertisers paused ads, Musk announced a huge drop in revenue. He said: “Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists… extremely messed up! “They’re trying to destroy free speech in America.”
$8 for a checkmark: The company rolled out its updated blue subscription for $8 per month. It included ad-free articles for blue subscribers and a blue checkmark next to their usernames. Earlier, the checkmark meant that the company had confirmed the account belonged to the person or company claiming it. At the moment, this upgrade is available in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.
Long-form text and content monetization: The platform is working on allowing users to add long-form text to their tweets. While announcing the news on Twitter, Musk said, “Twitter will soon add the ability to attach long-form text to tweets, ending the absurdity of notepad screenshots.” He also added that it will be followed by creator monetization for all forms of content.
Permanent bans on impersonation without parody label: Before buying Twitter, Musk argued against lifetime bans and promised to reinstate banned users. However, he has now announced that Twitter will permanently suspend account impersonators if they fail to clearly label their work as parody. This particular move came after several verified “blue-check” users changed their accounts to impersonate the business magnate himself. He took to Twitter to show his dissatisfaction, saying, “Going forward, any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying “parody” will be permanently suspended.”