Tag: elon musk

Twitter’s Outsourced Content Moderators Face Layoffs After Elon Musk Takeover

Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk is further gutting the teams that battle misinformation on the social media platform as outsourced moderators learned over the weekend they were out of a job.

Twitter and other big social media firms have relied heavily on contractors to track hate and enforce rules against harmful content.

But many of those content watchdogs have now headed out the door, first when Twitter fired much of its full-time workforce by email on November 4 and now as it moves to eliminate an untold number of contract jobs.

Melissa Ingle, who worked at Twitter as a contractor for more than a year, was one of a number of contractors who said they were terminated Saturday. She said she’s concerned that there’s going to be an increase in abuse on Twitter with the number of workers leaving.

“I love the platform and I really enjoyed working at the company and trying to make it better. And I’m just really fearful of what’s going to slip through the cracks,” she said Sunday.

Ingle, a data scientist, said she worked on the data and monitoring arm of Twitter’s civic integrity team. Her job involved writing algorithms to find political misinformation on the platform in countries such as the US, Brazil, Japan, Argentina, and elsewhere.

Ingle said she was “pretty sure I was done for” when she couldn’t access her work email Saturday. The notification from the contracting company she’d been hired by came two hours later.

“I’ll just be putting my resumes out there and talking to people,” she said. “I have two children. And I’m worried about being able to give them a nice Christmas, you know, and just mundane things like that, that are important. I just think it’s particularly heartless to do this at this time.”

Content-moderation expert Sarah Roberts, an associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles who worked as a staff researcher at Twitter earlier this year, said she believes at least 3,000 contract workers were fired Saturday night.

Twitter hasn’t said how many contract workers it cut. The company hasn’t responded to media requests for information since Musk took over.

At Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters and other offices, contract workers wore green badges while full-time workers wore blue badges. Contractors did a number of jobs to help keep Twitter running, including engineering and marketing, Roberts said. But it was the huge force of contracted moderators that was “mission critical” to the platform, said Roberts.

Cutting them will have a “tangible impact on the experience of the platform,” she said.

Musk promised to loosen speech restrictions when he took over Twitter. But in the early days after Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion (roughly Rs. 3,55,870 crore) in late October and dismissed its board of directors and top executives, the billionaire Tesla CEO sought to assure civil rights groups and advertisers that the platform could continue tamping down hate and hate-fueled violence.

That message was reiterated by Twitter’s then-head of content moderation, Yoel Roth, who tweeted that the November 4 layoffs only affected “15 percent of our Trust & Safety organisation (as opposed to approximately 50 percent cuts company-wide), with our front-line moderation staff experiencing the least impact.”

Roth has since resigned from the company, joining an exodus of high-level leaders who were tasked with privacy protection, cybersecurity and complying with regulations.

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Elon Musk Says Twitter Will Work to Push Citizen Journalism, Criticises ‘Media Elite’

Twitter CEO Elon Musk has criticised “media elite” and stated that the increased competition from citizen journalism will lead the mainstream media’s “oligopoly on information” to be disrupted.

On Friday, Musk took to Twitter and shared a couple of tweets that reflected his thoughts on the current state of journalism.

In the first one he spoke about Twitter’s goal of elevating citizen journalism and wrote, “As Twitter pursues the goal of elevating citizen journalism, media elite will try everything to stop that from happening.”

Further, in a subsequent tweet, he said that though the “mainstream media will still thrive, but increased competition from citizens will cause them to be more accurate, as their oligopoly on information is disrupted.”

Basically, it seems like the tech entrepreneur wanted to imply that mainstream media’s need to check the information accuracy has increased as there has been a rise of citizen journalism in recent years due to social media platforms.

Meanwhile, since completing the Twitter deal, the wealthiest man on the planet has made a flurry of decisions impacting the working of Twitter that has millions of daily active users.

Among the biggest change that Twitter is seeing is the inclusion of the new $7.99 (roughly Rs. 650) per month Blue subscription. However, Musk’s decision to implement the blue tick fee did not go well with many. Even some advertiser pulled back their leg from the site.

Also, celebrities including Whoopi Goldberg and Gigi Hadid quit Twitter in the days following its acquisition.

In other news, it has been reported) that Twitter on Friday brought back the “official” badge to some accounts, just days after doing away with it, while several users reported the new subscription option for the blue verification check mark had disappeared.

The move follows a surge in fake accounts on the platform after new boss Elon Musk allowed users to pay $8 for the coveted blue check mark that was previously reserved for verified accounts of politicians, actors and other major personalities.

© Thomson Reuters 2022

 

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

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Tesla Said to Be Considering Exporting Made-in-China Electric Cars to US

Tesla is considering exporting made-in-China electric cars to the United States, two people with knowledge of the planning told Reuters, a reversal that would reflect the automaker’s deepening cost advantage at its Shanghai plant and slower demand from Chinese consumers.

Tesla has been studying whether parts made by its China-based suppliers are compliant with local regulations in North America, and if they are, could ship China-made Model Y and Model 3 cars for sale there as soon as next year, said the people, who declined to be named as the matter is private.

That could also open a channel for exports to Canada, one of the people said.

Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory has the capacity to produce 1.1 million electric vehicles per year after an upgrade earlier this year, making it Tesla’s most productive manufacturing hub.

The Shanghai plant makes Model 3 sedans and Model Y crossovers to sell in China and for export to markets including Europe, Australia and South East Asia.

Until recently, Tesla had been selling or shipping for export every vehicle it could produce in Shanghai, but inventory levels rose by their largest margin ever in October, according to data from brokerage CMBI.

In addition, factors including a cheaper yuan against the US dollar, lower raw material prices in China and the rise in Tesla and new-car prices in the United States have combined to make exports from China to the United States potentially cost competitive, the people with knowledge of the plans said.

The plan, if enacted, could create new complexity for US buyers. Under the terms of a new electric vehicle subsidy and production-incentive plan signed into law by US President Joe Biden, the incentive available for an individual vehicle could vary depending on whether it was imported.

It could also be politically contentious. Tesla has been widely seen as one of major beneficiaries of the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which offers rebates of up to $7,500 (nearly Rs. 6 lakh) on EV purchases as part of a law intended to push automakers to reduce their reliance on China.

Tesla Chief Financial Officer Zachary Kirkhorn told investors last month that the automaker was “very well-positioned to capture a significant share” of the incentives offered under the IRA for EVs and batteries for energy storage.

Until now, Tesla’s strategy has been to build the cars it sells in North America at its plants in Fremont, California, and Austin, Texas.

The California plant, Tesla’s first, produces the Model S, the Model three sedans and the Model X and Model Y crossovers. The Texas plant, which opened earlier this year, makes the Model Y and will produce Tesla’s upcoming Cybertruck.

Tesla is also ramping up production at a plant it opened in Berlin earlier this year. Output from the Berlin plant will reduce the need for some exports from China, one of the sources said.

At the same time, the price gap between Tesla cars sold in China and the United States has been widening, reflecting both higher US prices and new discounts in China.

In China, where CMBI analysts have warned of a coming “price war,” Tesla slashed the starter prices for Model 3 and Model Y in China by as much as 9 percent last month.

On Monday, it offered an additional rebate for buyers who take delivery this month and buy insurance from one of Tesla’s partners.

Tesla sells the Model Y for the equivalent of $49,344 (nearly Rs. 30 lakh) in China, compared to the US price of $65,990 (nearly Rs. 53 lakh). China-made cars face a 27.5 percent US tariff, while light-duty trucks face a 25 percent tariff.

China, the world’s largest auto market, imposes a 15 percent tariff on imported vehicles.

In 2018, before Tesla’s Shanghai plant was operating, Chief Executive Elon Musk had asked then-President Donald Trump to raise tariffs on cars imported to the United States from China in order to achieve “a fair outcome” where both sides had equivalent and “equally moderate” tariffs.

Tesla would not be the first US automaker to ship made-in-China vehicles to the United States. General Motors has imported the Buick Envision SUV and unsuccessfully petitioned for an exemption to 25 percent US tariffs imposed by the Trump administration.

© Thomson Reuters 2022

 

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Elon Musk ends remote work for Twitter staff: report

Elon Musk has reportedly emailed his Twitter employees to warn of “difficult times ahead” and inform them that they will no longer be permitted to work remotely – unless he personally approves it.

Musk sent an email to his staff for the first time late Wednesday, saying there was “no way to sugarcoat the message” about the economy and its impact on Twitter, which depends on ads, according to Bloomberg, which reviewed the email.

The employees will be expected to be in the office for at least 40 hours a week, added the billionaire, who took over the platform in a $44 billion deal on Oct. 27.

“The road ahead is arduous and will require intense work to succeed,” Musk wrote his employees, Bloomberg said.

In another email, the world’s richest man added that “over the next few days, the absolute top priority is finding and suspending any verified bots/trolls/spam.”

Twitter employees will be expected to be in the office for at least 40 hours a week.
AP

Musk, who also is the CEO of Tesla, told workers at the electric car maker in June that working remotely was no longer acceptable.

News about the end of working from home comes days after he announced that roughly half of Twitter’s staffers were being let go.

Musk also is charging $8 a month for the Twitter Blue subscription and its attached user verification.

If employees want to work from home, Elon Musk must personally approve it.
AP
Elon Musk says he wants to see subscriptions account for half of Twitter’s revenue.
Twitter/@elonmusk

The new boss said in the email that he wants to see subscriptions account for half of the platform’s revenue, according to the news outlet.

On Wednesday, Musk sought to reassure big companies that advertise on Twitter that his chaotic takeover won’t harm their brands — acknowledging that some “dumb things” might happen on his way to creating what he says will be a better, safer user experience.

The latest erratic move on the minds of major advertisers was his decision to abolish a new “official” label on high-profile accounts just hours after introducing it.

Twitter began adding gray labels to prominent accounts, such as Coca-Cola, Nike and Apple, to indicate that they are authentic. A few hours later, the labels started disappearing.

“Apart from being an aesthetic nightmare when looking at the Twitter feed, it was simply another way of creating a two-class system,” Musk told advertisers in an hour-long conversation broadcast live on Twitter.

“It wasn’t addressing the core problem,” he added.

Major brands including General Motors, United Airlines and General Mills have temporarily stopped buying ads on Twitter, as they watch whether Musk’s plans to loosen its guardrails against hate speech will lead to a spike in online toxicity.

Musk said he’s planning a “content moderation council” representing diverse viewpoints that will address inappropriate content and reassure advertisers, but it would take “a few months” to put together.

He added that it will be advisory and “not a command council.”

With Post wires

 

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Twitter ‘Official’ Tick Starts Appearing on Verified Accounts in India, Original Blue Ticks Still Visible For Now

Twitter has started displaying a new tick badge with the word ‘Official’ on the recognised Twitter accounts of news sources and public figures in India. Gadgets 360 has received its own tick, as has Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The previous “blue tick” badge, indicating that an account has been verified, are also still shown, for now. Twitter recently caused a storm for changing the way its widely recognised blue ticks work – instead of signifying that an account has been verified by Twitter as belonging to a noteworthy institution or individual, they are now given to all people who subscribe to Twitter Blue, the company’s paid offering.

One of the first sweeping changes announced by Twitter’s new CEO Elon Musk was the repurposing of the blue tick and raising the price of Twitter Blue to $8 (approximately Rs. 650) per month, after initially suggesting that the privilege should cost $20 (approximately Rs. 1,630). Musk has also indicated that he wants to expand Twitter Blue to multiple countries including India before the end of November, and that prices will be adjusted in keeping with purchasing power parity. 

Twitter Blue subscribers will also be promoted higher in search results, reply threads and trending topic lists. This will result in the amplification of paid voices, which Musk is hoping will drive adoption of the premium subscription service. However, critics quickly noted that this defeats the purpose of verification, allowing anyone who pays for Twitter Blue to appear to be a verified account. This also led to a spate of deliberate attempts to impersonate celebrities including Musk, who soon clarified that parody accounts need to be marked as such explicitly in their names, or risk permanent suspension from the platform.

Twitter’s solution to this appears to be the introduction of a second checkmark with the word ‘Official’, which has now begun appearing below the account’s handle and name on profile pages and in search results. It is not yet clear how Twitter will decide which accounts qualify for this badge, and whether everyone who was previously eligible for verification will be able to get one.

Ever since Musks acquisition of Twitter went through, he has been making news. He first fired the previous CEO and dissolved the entire board of directors, Most recently, Musk has made moves to curb expenses, including a massive round of layoffs, in which an estimated 50 percent of all employees including entire teams and a significant portion of Twitter’s Indian workforce were forced to exit the company, leaving work unfinished and teams understaffed.  

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Twitter’s Pared-Down Staff Said to Struggle With Misinformation Amid US Midterm Elections

Twitter is struggling to respond to political misinformation and other harmful posts on the social media platform after Elon Musk fired roughly half of its workforce just days before the US midterm elections, according to employees who survived the cuts and an outside voting rights group.

The recent mass layoffs spared many of the people whose job it is to keep hate and misinformation off the social-media platform. Musk cut just 15 percent of those frontline content-moderation workers, compared to roughly 50 percent job cuts companywide, an executive said last week.

But in preparation for the layoffs, employees said the company also sharply reduced how many employees can look into a specific account’s digital history and behaviour — a practice necessary to investigate if it’s been used maliciously and take action to suspend it. The company said it froze access to those tools to reduce “insider risk” at a time of transition.

The developments are causing concern as the US midterm elections culminate on Tuesday. Though millions of Americans have already cast early and absentee ballots, millions more are expected to go to the polls to cast in-person votes. Election watchers fear the platform may not be equipped to handle hate speech, misinformation that could impact voter safety and security, and actors seeking to cast doubt on the legitimate winners of elections around the country.

Researchers tracking misinformation ahead of the midterms notified Twitter on Friday about three posts from well-known far-right figures that advanced debunked claims about election fraud. The posts remain up three days later. When Common Cause asked Twitter for an update on Monday, the platform said the posts were “under review.”

Before Musk took over, Twitter responded much more quickly, said Jesse Littlewood, vice president for campaigns at Common Cause. The group said they had been in regular contact with Twitter staff before Musk took over. Now, they are getting a response from a generic email address.

“We had been getting much faster decisions from them, sometimes within hours,” said Littlewood. Now, he said, “It’s like pushing the button for the walk sign at the stop light, and nothing is happening.”

Musk gutted teams working on marketing, communications and editorial curation of what people see on Twitter. But his decision to retain most of Twitter’s content moderation team came as a welcome surprise to some inside and outside the company. Musk, after all, promised to let free speech flourish by loosening Twitter’s content restrictions and restoring accounts banned for violating those rules. He has also pledged to end the current user verification system in favour of a $7.99 (roughly Rs. 600) subscription fee.

But the fact that the content moderation team survived could mean that critical misinformation functions such as blocking incitements of political violence will continue, and some of the worst-case scenarios around election misinformation won’t be realized. Some of Musk’s own tweets have been annotated with fact-checked context in recent days.

Two employees who survived the job cuts credit a previously little-known executive Yoel Roth, Twitter’s global head of safety and integrity, for leveraging his team’s importance to Musk’s goals for Twitter while avoiding moves that might anger the mercurial Tesla CEO.

“Yoel Roth singlehandedly saved the company,” said a Twitter employee who spoke on condition of anonymity because of concerns about job security. “On the public side, he appropriately and thoughtfully engaged with Elon Musk in a way that was not subservient, but deferring, because Elon is the king.”

Roth has become the public face of Twitter’s content moderation since Musk took over and has regularly defended Twitter’s ongoing efforts to fight harmful misinformation. Musk, a prolific tweeter with more than 110 million followers, has frequently pointed to Roth’s Twitter feed as the most reliable account of the company’s adherence to integrity standards. And the billionaire, who embraces the idea that Twitter’s past leadership suppressed right-wing views, defended Roth when ardent Musk supporters demanded his firing over past comments they thought showed Roth’s liberal bias.

Roth, who once worked at an Apple store fixing Mac computers, joined Twitter in 2015 after spending a year studying online hate speech at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, according to his LinkedIn profile. In May, he took on a senior role “responsible for all user, content, and security policies, comprising more than 120 policymakers, threat investigators, data analysts, and operations specialists.”

Roth didn’t respond to requests for comment.

A legal scholar who sits on Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council, an advisory board set up in 2016, said she has long been impressed with Roth’s candor about the challenges of content moderation and the nuances of free speech — such as the importance of curbing abusive content to enable the free speech of women and others more likely to be harassed online.

“If Musk had been able to cut everybody in content moderation and just replace it with his ‘yes’ men, he probably would have,” said Mary Anne Franks, a law professor at the University of Miami and president of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative. “The only reason why he hasn’t is because he maybe recognizes that would make Twitter unworkable.”

One Twitter employee said Monday that layoff survivors were actively looking for new jobs in part because of Musk’s lack of commitment to keeping the platform free of hate speech and misinformation. Speaking anonymously because of concerns about job security, the employee said the job cuts would make Twitter’s staff less effective in following up and acting on complaints about election-related disinformation, because they included people leading civic integrity teams.

Franks said there’s always been a tension within Twitter and other social media companies between making money and protecting democracy and freedom of expression. She said that’s only getting harder under Musk, who has shown Twitter can act quickly in banning a comedian who made fun of him by impersonating his account, but who has otherwise expressed hostility towards Twitter’s anti-abuse standards.

“I would imagine that someone in a position like Roth’s at Twitter would have to play a pretty delicate game trying not to trip any of the wires, not to trigger a backlash from Musk because he’s incredibly thin-skinned,” Franks said.

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Mastodon Hailed as Open Alternative to Twitter After Elon Musk Takeover: All You Need to Know

With Twitter in disarray since the world’s richest person took control of it last week, Mastodon, a decentralised, open alternative from privacy-obsessed Germany, has seen a flood of new users.

“The bird is free,” tweeted Tesla mogul Elon Musk when he completed his $44 billion (roughly Rs. 3,37,465 crore) acquisition of Twitter. But many free-speech advocates reacted with dismay to the prospect of the world’s “town square” being controlled by one person and started looking for other options.

For the most part, Mastodon looks like Twitter, with hashtags, political back-and-forth and tech banter jostling for space with cat pictures.

But while Twitter and Facebook are controlled by one authority — a company — Mastodon is installed on thousands of computer servers, largely run by volunteer administrators who join their systems together in a federation.

People swap posts and links with others on their own server— or Mastodon “instance” — and also, almost as easily, with users on other servers across the growing network.

The fruit of six years’ work by Eugen Rochko, a young German programmer, Mastodon was born of his desire to create a public sphere that was beyond the control of a single entity. That work is starting to pay off.

“We’ve hit 1,028,362 monthly active users across the network today,” Rochko tooted – Mastodon’s version of tweeting – on Monday. “That’s pretty cool.”

That is still tiny compared with his established rivals. Twitter reported 238 million daily active users who had seen an advert as of the second quarter of 2022. Facebook said it had 1.98 billion daily active users as of the third quarter.

But the jump in Mastodon users in a matter of days has still been startling.

“I’ve gotten more new followers on Mastodon in the last week than I have in the previous five years,” Ethan Zuckerman, a social media expert at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, wrote last week.

Before Musk completed the Twitter acquisition on October 27, Mastodon’s growth averaged 60-80 new users an hour, according to the widely-cited Mastodon Users account. It showed 3,568 new registrations in one hour on Monday morning.

Rochko started Mastodon in 2017, when rumours were spreading that PayPal founder and Musk ally Peter Thiel wanted to buy Twitter.

“A right-wing billionaire was going to buy a de facto public utility that isn’t public,” Rochko told Reuters earlier this year. “It’s really important to have this global communications platform where you can learn what’s happening in the world and chat to your friends. Why is that controlled by one company?”

Toots and instances

There is no shortage of other social networks ready to welcome any Twitter exodus, from Bytedance’s Tiktok to Discord, a chat app now popular far beyond its original constituency of gamers.

Mastodon’s advocates say its decentralised approach makes it fundamentally different: rather than go to Twitter’s centrally-provided service, every user can choose their own provider, or even run their own Mastodon instance, much as users can e-mail from Gmail or an employer-provided account or run their own e-mail server.

No single company or person, can impose their will on the whole system or shut it all down. If an extremist voice emerged with their own server, the advocates say, it would be easy enough for other servers to cut ties with it, leaving it to talk to its own shrinking band of followers and users.

The federated approach has downsides: it is harder to find people to follow in Mastodon’s anarchic sprawl then on the neatly ordered town square that centrally administered Twitter or Facebook can offer.

But its growing group of supporters say those are outweighed by the advantages of its architecture.

Rochko, whose Mastodon foundation runs on a shoestring crowdfunded budget topped up with a modest grant from the European Commission, has found a particularly receptive audience among privacy-conscious European regulators.

Germany’s data protection commissioner is waging a campaign to get government bodies to close their Facebook pages, since, he says, there is no way of hosting a page there that conforms to European privacy laws.

Authorities should move to the federal government’s own Mastodon instance, he says. The European Commission also maintains a server for EU bodies to toot from.

“No exclusive information should be sent over a legally questionable platform,” data commissioner Ulrich Kelber said earlier this year.

While Mastodon is busier than ever before, it still has few of the big names from politics and showbiz that have made Twitter an addictive online home for journalists in particular. Few know comic Jan Boehmermann — Germany’s answer to John Oliver — outside his country, but more names are arriving daily.

For Rochko, the project’s only full-time employee, programming at his home in a small town in eastern Germany for a modest EUR 2,400 (roughly Rs. 1,96,800) monthly salary, the work continues.

“Would you believe me if I told you I’m extremely tired?” he tooted on Sunday.

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Twitter’s ‘Massive’ Revenue Drop Adds to Firm’s Heavy Debt Burden After Elon Musk Takeover

Elon Musk’s revelation that Twitter has suffered a “massive” revenue drop since he took over 10 days ago underscores the precarious nature of the social media company’s finances after he saddled it with $13 billion (roughly Rs. 105 crore) in debt, credit experts say.

Musk tweeted on Friday that Twitter was losing more than $4 million (roughly Rs. 33 crore) a day, largely because advertisers started fleeing once he took over. He has blamed civil rights activists pressuring advertisers, though many in the advertising industry say his tweets spreading conspiracy theories have contributed.

Yet even before this upheaval, Musk had engineered an acquisition that pushed the San Francisco-based company’s finances to the edge.

Twitter faces interest payments totaling close to $1.2 billion (roughly Rs. 9,830 crore) in the next 12 months on the debt that Musk piled on it, following a string of interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve, an analysis of the financing terms disclosed in regulatory filings shows.

The payments exceed Twitter’s most recently disclosed cash flow, which amounted to $1.1 billion (roughly Rs. 9,010 crore) as of the end of June, according to financial disclosures Twitter made before Musk took it private on October 27.

Some aspects of Twitter’s current financial health are uncertain, because the company hasn’t made enough disclosures. It’s not clear how much of the $5.29 billion (roughly Rs. 43,330 crore) debt Twitter had before the acquisition was refinanced or remained with the company. It’s also not clear how much of the $2.7 billion (roughly Rs. 22,120 crore) in cash that Twitter held as of the end of June it got to keep once it went private.

Debt investors and analysts said Musk needs to ensure the company is profitable enough to meet its debt payments or it will require a cash infusion.

“Leverage could spike into the double digits unless Mr. Musk contributes significantly more equity than previously contemplated or significantly improves profitability,” S&P Global analysts wrote in a credit research note. They have given the company a “junk” B-minus rating.

Twitter and Musk representatives did not respond to requests for comment.

Musk and his co-investors collectively cut a check for more than $30 billion (roughly Rs. 24,580 crore) of their own money for the Twitter deal. That money would be at risk if Twitter required a debt restructuring down the line.

Musk has started to dramatically slash costs, letting go of half of the company’s 7,400 employees. Overall, he is trying to find up to $1 billion (roughly Rs.8,190 crore) in annual infrastructure cost savings, including from servers and cloud services. In 2021, Twitter had total costs and expenses of $5.6 billion (roughly Rs. 4,590 crore).

Musk has also outlined plans for a new subscription service that will include the verification of Twitter users’ authenticity and cost $8 (roughly Rs. 655) per month. If he can generate enough revenue to diversify Twitter’s profits without alienating users, that would be a boon, credit analysts said.

Brand Advertising

In their note, S&P analysts also said that an expected economic recession would weigh on Twitter’s advertising revenue next year. Musk said last week that Twitter is more vulnerable to cuts in advertising than other social media platforms because most of it comes from advertising of brands, rather than direct-response advertising that involves interaction with the consumers. Advertisers slash brand advertising first during lean times.

Twitter’s woes are also a problem for the banks that backed Musk’s acquisition, even if the company continues to meet its debt obligations, because they need to shed the debt from their books and sell it on to investors. They have held on to it thus far because higher interest rates have made it less attractive to investors, and they would have to sell it at a discount. A deterioration in Twitter’s business has the potential to turn what is currently a loss of hundreds of millions of dollars for the banks into billions of dollars.

“It’s going to be hard to sell the debt because the business is expected to decline next year,” said Roberta Goss, a senior managing director at Pretium Partners, which invests in corporate debt.

© Thomson Reuters 2022

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Twitter Blue Price Rises to $7.99, Now Gives Subscribers a Blue Tick for Verification, Fewer Ads

Twitter has pushed out an update for its iOS app which introduces the new revamped Twitter Blue subscription that new owner and CEO Elon Musk has been promoting through his own tweets. Most interestingly, Twitter Blue subscribers will automatically get a blue checkmark badge on their profiles, which used to be given only to the verified accounts of corporates, celebrities, and public figures. Now, the “blue tick” will be something Twitter users have to pay for. The price of Twitter Blue has risen to $7.99 per month in the US from $4.99, and Musk has indicated that this will be scaled to purchasing power in other countries. According to the iOS app update’s release notes, the new ‘Twitter Blue with verification’ will first be available in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.

Other than the blue verification badge, Twitter Blue subscribers will see half as many ads, and the ones they do see will purportedly be twice as relevant to each user. The release notes also indicate that subscribers will be able to post longer videos and their content will be ranked higher in search results as well as reply threads and lists of mentions. On the other hand, the ability to read articles on participating sites ad-free has already been dropped as a Twitter Blue feature despite the price increase. Musk has also suggested that the ability to edit tweets will soon be available to everyone, as opposed to only Twitter Blue subscribers. 

While the Twitter app update is now visible in the App Store, it appears as though these features might not be available to everyone yet. An account claiming to be that of a Twitter “early stage products” employee, though notably lacking a verification badge, tweeted that the new Blue subscription plan isn’t live yet, as tests are ongoing as changes are being pushed live in a rush to get it rolled out. Others have tweeted screenshots of the Twitter Blue sign-up page. It also isn’t clear yet when or whether the plan will roll out in other countries and users on other platforms will be able to sign up.

Twitter has not yet indicated what will happen to current Twitter Blue subscribers. It is however likely that everyone who currently has a verification badge but does not choose to pay the subscription fee will lose it. While the company characterises current and potential subscribers as “supporting Twitter in the battle against the bots”, this change will tip the balance of exposure on the platform in favour of those willing to pay for it and could also potentially make it harder to find authoritative sources of information.

The change to Twitter Blue is one of many things Musk has tweeted about. Most notably, he initially proposed a $20 fee (approximately Rs. 1,639) for the widely recognised verification tick. Although he says this is aimed at reducing spam on the platform and making it harder for bots to thrive, Musk has wasted no time in making dramatic changes to turn his investment around.

Ever since taking over the company and firing the previous CEO as well as the entire board of directors, Musk has been generating headlines. Twitter embarked on a massive cost-cutting and layoff spree this week, cutting an estimated 50 percent of all employees including entire teams and a significant portion of its Indian workforce. Musk has also reportedly demanded that all remaining remote employees report to an office, and brought several Tesla engineers and advisers from his other companies in to help overhaul Twitter’s business.  



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Elon Musk Says Laid Off Employees Were Offered 3 Months of Severance

Twitter laid off half its workforce on Friday but said cuts were smaller in the team responsible for preventing the spread of misinformation, as advertisers pulled spending amid concerns about content moderation.

Tweets by staff of the social media company said teams responsible for communications, content curation, human rights, and machine learning ethics were among those axed, as were some product and engineering teams.

The move caps a week of chaos and uncertainty about the company’s future under new owner Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, who tweeted on Friday that the service was experiencing a “massive drop in revenue” from the advertiser retreat.

Musk blamed the losses on a coalition of civil rights groups that has been pressing Twitter’s top advertisers to take action if he did not protect content moderation – concerns heightened ahead of potential pivotal congressional elections on Tuesday.

After the layoffs, the groups said they were escalating their pressure and demanding brands pull their Twitter ads globally.

“Unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day,” Musk tweeted of the layoffs, adding that everyone affected was offered three months of severance pay.

The company was silent about the depth of the cuts until late in the day, when head of safety and integrity Yoel Roth tweeted confirmation of internal plans, seen by Reuters earlier in the week, projecting the layoffs would affect about 3,700 people, or 50 percent of the staff.

Among those let go were 784 employees from the company’s San Francisco headquarters and 199 in San Jose and Los Angeles, according to filings to California’s employment authority.

Roth said the reductions hit about 15 percent of his team, which is responsible for preventing the spread of misinformation and other harmful content, and that the company’s “core moderation capabilities” remained in place.

Musk endorsed the safety executive last week, citing his “high integrity” after Roth was called out over tweets critical of former President Donald Trump years earlier.

Musk has promised to restore free speech while preventing Twitter from descending into a “hellscape.”

President Joe Biden said on Friday that Musk had purchased a social media platform in Twitter that spews lies across the world.

“And now what are we all worried about: Elon Musk goes out and buys an outfit that sends – that spews lies all across the world… There’s no editors anymore in America. There’s no editors. How do we expect kids to be able to understand what is at stake?”

Major advertisers have expressed apprehension about Musk’s takeover for months.

Brands including General Motors and General Mills have said they stopped advertising on Twitter while awaiting information about the new direction of the platform.

Musk tweeted that his team had made no changes to content moderation and had done “everything we could” to appease the groups. Speaking at an investors conference in New York on Friday, Musk called the activist pressure “an attack on the First Amendment.”

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.

Access to systems cut

The email notifying staff about layoffs was the first communication Twitter workers received from the company’s leadership after Musk took over last week. It was signed only by “Twitter,” without naming Musk or any other executives.

Dozens of staffers tweeted they had lost access to work email and Slack channels overnight before receiving an official layoff notice on Friday morning, prompting an outpouring of laments by current and former employees on the platform they had built.

They shared blue hearts and salute emojis expressing support for one another, using the hashtags #OneTeam and #LoveWhereYouWorked, a past-tense version of the slogan employees had used for years to celebrate the company’s work culture.

Twitter’s curation team, which was responsible for “highlighting and contextualizing the best events and stories that unfold on Twitter,” had been axed, employees wrote.

Shannon Raj Singh, an attorney who was Twitter’s acting head of human rights, tweeted that the entire human rights team at the company had been sacked.

Another team that focused on research into how Twitter employed machine learning and algorithms, an issue that was a priority for Musk, was also eliminated, according to a tweet from a former senior manager at Twitter.

Senior executives including vice president of engineering Arnaud Weber said their goodbyes on Twitter on Friday: “Twitter still has a lot of unlocked potential but I’m proud of what we accomplished.”

Employees of Twitter Blue, the premium subscription service that Musk is bolstering, were also let go. An employee with the handle “SillyRobin” who had indicated they were laid off, quote-tweeted a previous Musk tweet saying Twitter Blue would include “paywall bypass” for certain publishers.

“Just to be clear, he fired the team working on this,” the employee said.

Doos locked

Twitter said in its email to staffers that offices would be temporarily closed and badge access suspended “to help ensure the safety of each employee as well as Twitter systems and customer data.”

Offices in London and Dublin appeared deserted on Friday, with no employees in sight. At the London office, any evidence Twitter had once occupied the building was erased.

A receptionist at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters said a few people had trickled in and were working on the floors above despite the notice to stay away.

A class action was filed on Thursday against Twitter by several employees, who argued the company was conducting mass layoffs without providing the required 60-day advance notice, in violation of federal and California law.

The lawsuit asked the San Francisco federal court to issue an order to restrict Twitter from soliciting employees being laid off to sign documents without informing them of the pendency of the case.

© Thomson Reuters 2022

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