Michelle ThompsonElon Musk, a billionaire and the company’s new owner, fired Twitter’s CEO and other senior officials a year ago when he strolled into the San Francisco offices sporting a white bathroom sink and a smile, and he started rebranding the social media network as X.
X has a similar appearance and feel to Twitter, but it becomes increasingly obvious that this is just an approximation the longer you use it. Key components of what made Twitter unique have been removed by Musk, including the platform’s verification system, Trust and Safety advisory committee, name, and blue bird emblem. Not to mention enforcement of hate speech laws and content moderation.
The bulk of its staff, including the engineers who maintain the site’s functionality, the moderators who prevent hate speech from taking over, and the executives in charge of establishing and enforcing regulations, were also let go, laid off, or fired by him.
Longtime Twitter observers claim that this has led to the demise of the platform’s function as a flawed but helpful resource for news and information about the world. It’s still uncertain what X will develop into and whether Musk can fulfill his goal of making it a universally used “everything app” as it was a year ago.
Insider Intelligence analyst Jasmine Enberg stated, “Musk is no closer to his vision of a ‘everything app,’ than he was a year ago. He hasn’t managed to make a single meaningful improvement to the platform.” “Instead, X has alienated advertisers and users, and as a result, it no longer offers its core value proposition in the social media space, which is serving as a hub for news.”
Even before he acquired the company, Musk was one of the most well-known and active users on the network, thus his experience on Twitter was very different from that of average users. However, a lot of the adjustments he’s made to X are based on his personal opinions about the website; in fact, he asked his millions of followers for management counsel, and they suggested he step down.
According to Enberg, “the single biggest factor contributing to Twitter’s demise was Musk’s treatment of the platform as a technology company that he could remake and his vision rather than a social network powered by people and ad dollars.”
The blue checkmarks that used to indicate that an account’s owner was who they claimed to be—a celebrity, athlete, journalist from a national or local publication, or a nonprofit organization—now just indicate that someone is paying $8 per month for a subscription service that elevates their posts above those of users who have not been verified. These paid accounts have been observed to disseminate false information on the platform, which its algorithms frequently amplify.
For example, a new investigation released on Thursday by the left-wing charity Media Matters revealed that many blue-checked X accounts with tens of thousands of followers stated that the Maine mass shooting was a government-planned “false flag.” Additionally, these accounts were discovered to be disseminating propaganda and false information regarding the Israel-Hamas conflict. In fact, the European Commission sent X a formal, legally-binding request for information regarding how it handled hate speech, false information, and violent terrorist content related to the conflict.
The amount of misinformation on the Israel-Hamas conflict that is “being algorithmically promoted” on the platform, according to well-known foreign policy analyst Ian Bremmer, “is unlike anything I’ve ever been exposed to in my career as a political scientist.”
The platform’s identity is not the only thing that is in doubt. Even while Twitter was already having financial difficulties when Musk paid $44 billion for it in a deal that concluded on October 27, 2022, things seem even more dire now. The company’s books are no longer available to the public because Musk turned the business private, but in July, the CEO of Tesla stated that the business had lost over half of its advertising revenue and still had a significant debt load.
On July 14, he said on the website, “We’re still negative cash flow.” He attributed this to “a 50% drop in advertising revenue plus heavy debt load.”
Before we can afford anything else, we must achieve positive cash flow, he stated.
In an attempt to entice back major companies, Musk hired Linda Yaccarino, a former NBC executive with extensive connections to the advertising sector, in May. However, the move has not yielded significant results. Despite a comeback in the online advertising industry that lifted the most recent quarterly profits for Facebook parent firm Meta and Google parent company Alphabet, some advertisers have returned to X, but they are not spending as much as they did previously.
According to Insider Intelligence, X will earn $1.89 billion in advertising income this year, a 54% decrease from 2022. Its $1.99 billion in ad revenue in 2015 was the last time it was close to this amount. It was $4.12 billion in 2022.
It is also evident from outside research that X is being used less.
Research firm Similarweb reports that worldwide web traffic to Twitter.com decreased by 14% on an annual basis, while traffic to the advertisers’ ads.twitter.com platform decreased by 16.5%. The performance on mobile devices was also subpar, declining 17.8% annually based on the total number of monthly active users across Android and Apple’s iOS.
Before Musk came control, “even though Twitter’s cultural relevance was already starting to decline, it’s as if the platform no longer exists.” And it’s been a thousand cuts to death,” stated Enberg.
“The fact that practically all of the wounds were self-inflicted is incredibly remarkable. Normally, at least a few outside variables are involved when a social media platform begins to lose its significance, but this time, that is not the case.
