The IT Nerd

Yes, I know. I’ve been predicting doom and gloom for Twitter since Elon Musk took over. But it seems that we’re now in the end game. Starting with the fact that Twitter has disbanded its ‘Trust and Safety Council’:

The company said in the email that it was “reevaluating how best to bring external insights into our product and policy development work. As part of this process, we have decided that the Trust and Safety Council is not the best structure to do this.”

The move comes as Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk is undoing many of the policies and practices put in place before he took over the social media company.

A page on Twitter’s website, which has now been removed, explained that the council was made up of external expert organizations that advised on issues including online safety, human and digital rights, suicide prevention, mental health, child sexual exploitation, and dehumanization.

“Together, they advocate for safety and advise us as we develop our products, programs, and rules,” Twitter previously explained.

Keep in mind that three members of this council quit over the weekend and pretty much highlighted that Elon wasn’t the least bit interested in taking their advice. I am going to go out on a limb and say that this is his reaction to that. An alternate view is that more members of this council might have been about to quit and he pre-empted that. Either way, this will not end well for Elon. Advertisers who are already skittish at advertising on Twitter are going to be even more skittish, and move their advertising budgets elsewhere. Which of course will cost Elon money. Plus this more will push users away from Twitter. We’ll come back to that shortly.

His workforce, or more accurately what’s left of it is another issue for Elon. And moves like this won’t help the situation:

Musk on Friday sent an email to Twitter staff, saying the company could sue workers who leak confidential information, a source told Insider.

Employees had until 5 p.m. PT on Saturday to sign a pledge agreeing not to leak and to abide by non-disclosure agreements they signed when they joined the company, according to the email which Platformer’s Zoë Schiffer obtained and cited in a Twitter thread on Saturday morning.

However, some staff didn’t respond to the pledge because they weren’t looking at their emails over the weekend, per Platformer’s recent report. These employees discovered on Sunday they had been cut off because they were unable to access company systems, the report said.

Twitter then sent another email about the pledge to its workforce, Platformer reported. The company requested staff to send an email to a certain team, confirming their decision to remain loyal to their non-disclosure agreements, the report said. The email said employees had until December 15 to respond, per Platformer.

I can totally see a scenario where this whole debacle sends more employees running for the exits. In effect, instead of gaining their loyalty, Elon has effectively pushed them away. Which makes his ability to run Twitter more difficult.

Speaking of that, if Elon reads this piece from PC Magazine, he’ll lose his mind:

Elon Musk will have a lot more abandoned Twitter usernames to hand out in the coming years, a new research note from Insider Intelligence predicts.

This forecast released Tuesday(Opens in a new window) sees Musk’s erratic stewardship of his $44 billion purchase inciting “an exodus of users next year and beyond,” with 32.7 million of Twitter’s estimated 368.4 million monthly active users worldwide logging off by 2024—almost 9% of the total.

“This is the first time we’ve predicted a drop in worldwide Twitter users since we began tracking the company in 2008,” Insider’s report comments in boldface type. 

A 9% drop doesn’t sound like a lot. But it basically shows that to borrow one of Elon’s favourite phrases, “Vox Populi, Vox Dei” which is Latin for “the voice of the people is the voice of God”. In this case the people leaving Twitter have spoken in terms of Elon’s ability to run the platform and make it a place to spend time on. Which is that Twitter is not a place that they want to spend time on. Any reasonable person who sees a report like this should be trying to figure out how to make sure that this scenario doesn’t play out. But Elon over the last few weeks has proven that he’s not a reasonable person. So I expect this scenario to play out as is, or worse. And here’s an example of worse:

Sunday, the Wall Street Journal reported that ad traffic on Twitter, as measured by the firm Similarweb, had plunged to record lows in early December—”traffic volume now so low it doesn’t even meet the firm’s threshold necessary to track and measure it.”

That’s a huge problem for Elon. And it’s a safe bet that his Twitter Blue relaunch won’t solve that problem. Which is why I can safely say that when it comes to Twitter, we’re now in the end game.

If you want proof that Elon Musk is so thin skinned that he cannot handle any competition, here’s a great example of that. People are starting to notice that Twitter posts that have the word “Mastodon” or links to a Mastodon account, or both in it are starting to look like this:

How is this possibly sensitive content? Oh yeah. It’s sensitive to Elon because it illustrates that Twitter is dying a slow death under his watch because of his gross incompetence. Because all this is going to do is to drive people who weren’t sure about fleeing Twitter to head to Mastodon. And it’s also going to make people like yours truly who still had Twitter accounts close them and go all in with Mastodon. Both will deprive Elon of eyeballs, which in turn will make advertisers not want to advertise on Twitter. That in turn will take money out of his pockets and accelerate the death spiral that Twitter is in.

Congratulations Elon, you played yourself. Again.

Three prominent members of Twitter’s Trust And Safety Council resigned over the weekend by Tweet. I encourage you to read the Tweet in question as it is eye opening:

This council has more than 70 members on it and has existed since 2016 according to Slate. This is what they did:

The council is a voluntary group of experts and civil society organizations tasked with advocating for user safety and guiding Twitter policy to “improve the health of the public conversation.” The body, which started in February 2016 after a moment of company crisis—including the departure of several key leaders and an all-time-low stock price—has long advised Twitter leadership on hefty issues like human rights, harassment, and suicide prevention, with the input of executives from prominent groups like Article 19 and the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Cleary Elon Musk has no time for this group which is why these departures happened. He’ll likely regret that as the EU has already put him on notice that he can’t do whatever he wants in terms of “free speech”. That means that other jurisdictions will likely be doing the same. And when he can’t demonstrates that he has a credible group of people to deal with things like misinformation, hate speech, etc., Elon will be in deep trouble. And I for one won’t feel the least be sorry for him.