The IT Nerd

Imagine surviving the Twitter downsizing exercise, and then you make it to payday and find out that you haven’t been paid. That’s what’s happened apparently to Twitter employees:

Twitter staff in the United Kingdom and Germany didn’t receive their salaries as scheduled for November, journalist Chris Stokel-Walker reported. Employees normally get paid on the 28th of every month.

As a result, Stokel-Walker said some Twitter workers were forced to go into overdraft when the money didn’t appear as expected.

“This is a huge issue that has got current and former employees in private groups up in arms,” Stokel-Walker tweeted. “Staff in Ireland and the Netherlands were paid on time. In the last 30 minutes, some of the salaries have been hitting bank accounts… one at a time, suggesting they’re doing it by hand.”

Some irate staff members, including those cut from the company following Elon Musk‘s takeover, tweeted that they still haven’t been paid for November.

This might have something to do with the fact that Twitter has lost most of their payroll team. Because if you don’t have a payroll group, people aren’t going to get paid. And related to that, if you mess with people’s pay, those people will head to the exits because it is suicide for an employee to mess with people’s pay.

Oh yeah. It also affects recruitment efforts, which apparently Twitter is recruiting employees after downsizing employees:

Just a week after taking control of Twitter, new owner Elon Musk laid off around half the company’s staff.

Since then, the tech mogul and Tesla CEO has let further staff go, some through layoffs aimed at downsizing the company and others through more targeted firings.

But after scrambling to get rid of staff, Twitter is still now actually hiring, Musk said in a presentation to the company, slides from which he posted on Twitter.

“We’re recruiting,” the slide simply read.

Twitter’s job-search site, however, doesn’t show any open roles at the company.

Ignoring the fact that this suggests that the downsizings combined with mass resignations have placed Twitter behind the eight ball, I have to ask this question. Seeing as Twitter is literally become a train wreck next to a dumpster fire with Elon Musk at the controls, who would be crazy enough to work for Elon Musk? I would suggest only the truly desperate or those who are taking a risk would. And to those people I would submit the following: Look elsewhere because it isn’t worth it.

Finally, remember when I said that the EU might make Elon’s life more miserable than it already is…. That may be starting to happen:

Twitter has shown a lack of transparency in the fight against misinformation, France’s regulator in charge of digital communications Arcom said on Monday, as the social media platform faced heightened scrutiny following steep job cuts.

In a third yearly report on “the fight against the manipulation of information,” Arcom pointed to Twitter’s “very loose transparency regarding data” on the matter, adding that the company had provided “imprecise” details on how its automated tools worked.

A spokesperson for Twitter in France did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment. The spokesperson has not responded to queries since Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter last month.

Arcom has no power to sanction online platforms for the spread of false information.

But under a French law adopted in 2018, 12 of these platforms must disclose the processes they have put in place to handle their own definition of misinformation, leading to “naming and shaming” presentations by the authority.

The 12 online platforms include Alphabet’s YouTube, online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, Meta’s Facebook and — for the first time — the fast-growing short-video platform TikTok, owned by China-based firm ByteDance.

French laws also compel large online platforms to provide means to its users to report false information that could alter the potential outcome of an election.

Twitter wasn’t the worst in class, according to Arcom’s report.

“TikTok, Yahoo and, to a lesser extent, Google, stand out particularly by the absence of tangible information allowing Arcom” to analyse the effectiveness of measures aimed at fighting information manipulation, the authority said.

The report comes a week after Twitter France’s head announced his resignation.

While Twitter wasn’t the worst here, this isn’t good news and is likely to get the attention of the EU. Who is likely chomping at the bit to pull him in for a little chat. And that will be very bad for Elon as being willing to be held accountable isn’t one of his strengths as a human being. Which means the EU will really have some “fun” with him as a result.

The title sounds weird. But hang with me. It will make sense in the end. There have been protests in a variety of Chinese cities over China’s strict COVID lockdown protocols. And this seems to have made the government nervous enough to use a novel tactic to make sure that news about these protests don’t get out. Via TechCrunch:

Search any major Chinese city on Twitter, and you will see a cascade of spam tweets showing porn, escort services, and gambling content that are published every few seconds, making it impossible to get any legitimate results.

There has been a “significant uptick” in these tweets over the last three days, according to a China-focused data analyst. The surge in such bot content coincides with an unprecedented wave of protests that have swept across major Chinese cities and universities over the weekend.

The demonstrations are largely a result of China’s zero-tolerance approach toward COVID-19, a rare show of defiance amongst the people. The country’s stringent COVID restrictions have led to prolonged lockdowns across the country, obstructing life, business, and manufacturing activities.

I have to admit that I did not have “China uses porn to cover up protests” on my BINGO card. That is very novel. Now according to the article Twitter is aware of this. And as this morning I was not able to reproduce this while last night I was. Thus there’s apparently someone left at Twitter who can take care of an issue like this. But now that China has done something like this, you can expect others to try the same thing. And then we’ll see how serious Elon Musk is about fighting bots on Twitter.

It seems that Elon Musk is hit two new lows when it comes to his behaviour. Let’s start with the fact that advertisers are running from advertising on Twitter in huge numbers. And according to this article, this has really ticked Elon off;

Elon Musk called up the chief executives of companies that pulled advertising spending from Twitter to complain, the Financial Times reported. 

A number of leading media buyers and advertising agencies say that almost all the major brands they act for have stopped ad spending on Twitter, the report said. 

Musk took it upon himself to personally call CEOs to chastise them, one industry figure told the FT, but his actions have backfired, the newspaper reported. 

Of course his actions have backfired. Calling up CEO’s to whine about them pulling adds is not an effective business development strategy. And this is another reason why you’re seeing less ads on Twitter:

Four industry figures told the Financial Times that in recent weeks agencies have not little communication with Twitter’s ads business team because so few staff were left following mass layoffs. 

Twitter’s ad systems have become bug-ridden, according to some media buyers, making it nearly impossible to launch campaigns. 

“It is quite unique. The turmoil, the damage, nothing of this magnitude has happened before. Never,” a big four advertising agency executive told the FT.

I have been using this phrase since the Twitter gong shows with Elon Musk being the ringmaster began. He’s turned Twitter into a train wreck next to a dumpster fire via his actions and his behaviour. Speaking of his behaviour, a reader pointed me towards an article in The Jerusalem Post that shows that Elon is playing the anti-semitic card when confronted with criticism. You be the judge:

Elon Musk called Jewish American retired US Army officer Lt.-Col. Alexander Vindman both a “puppet & puppeteer” on Monday in response to Vindman sharing a copypasta (copied and pasted text shared on the Internet) suggesting that Musk is “erratic” and too powerful now that he owns Twitter.

“Vindman is both puppet & puppeteer. Question is who pulls his strings … ?” Musk tweeted.

Musk’s tweet was in response to another one by Tablet magazine Chief Technology Officer Noah Blum mocking the copypasta, which said that it’s “Kinda weird that @elonmusk gets to decide how like a half-billion people communicate. Way too much power for one erratic individual to wield, don’t you think?”

Here’s the problem with that Tweet by Elon:

Musk’s tweet – deliberately or not – evoked an antisemitic trope that Jews are puppeteers who secretly wield power over various institutions or that they are puppets of the Israeli government.

An anti-semitic Tweet like this is massively problematic for Elon. It reinforces that he’s a racist, which is something that I said in this article from a week ago when he mocked Black Twitter. And I am pretty sure this will put Elon on a collision course with Apple and Google as it is becoming clear that Elon not only can’t or won’t moderate hate speech on Twitter, but his own behaviour is amplifying said hate speech. Which means that Apple and Google will have to make a choice as to if the Twitter app should be on their respective app stores. That’s on top of the fact that this is likely to send more advertisers to the exits because nobody wants to do business with a racist.

By the way, I checked his Twitter feed and the Tweets are still there. Read into that what you will.

Elon really needs to rethink how he acts and behaves as his current behaviour isn’t helping him in the slightest.

Elon Musk sees advertisers as a problem when it comes to him running Twitter. Thus he wants to reduce his reliance on advertisers In fact, this is his ideal revenue split:

Musk has said he wants subscriptions to account for 50% of Twitter’s total revenue, according to a message by a VP on an internal company slack.

The message, which was shared on Twitter by Platformer’s Casey Newton, said Musk thought the subscription aim “could help with conversations” and “pay by credit card could help with bots.

There’s two big problems. The fact that advertisers are fleeing the platform isn’t helping this as it reduces the revenue that he has coming into Twitter’s bank account while he makes this transition. And second, there’s the fact that it is very unlikely that Twitter Blue isn’t likely to catch on:

However, a survey from The Harris Poll, a global market research and consulting firm, found half of frequent US Twitter users said they would ditch the platform if it came with a monthly subscription fee.

The firm polled 2,063 US adults, 1,212 of which were Twitter users, from October 20 to October 28, the week Musk took over the company.

Pinar Yildirim, a professor of marketing and economics at The Wharton School, told Insider introducing a subscription model to Twitter could even drive users away from the platform. Yildirim said many users were waiting to see if Twitter becomes subscription-based.

“Worries about subscription changes have caused some users, either of higher status like some celebrities or ordinary users, to express a desire to potentially explore other platforms,” she said. 

“If in the end, the revenue model becomes such that everyone on Twitter has to pay a price,” she said, “that’s going to result clearly in a movement of users who may find it too expensive to simply be on Twitter.”

Well, that’s a problem. Then there’s the fact that the loans that Musk took require a $1 billion interest payment. But…:

If Musk wants to generate enough revenue to pay the $1 billion in interest owed on Twitter’s debt each year, it would need to add about 10 million more paying customers, according to social media expert Matt Navarra. 

I cannot honestly see how Musk squares this circle. With companies not advertising on Twitter, because they don’t need Twitter and Twitter needs them, there’s zero chance that Twitter Blue will make up the difference, Twitter is screwed and so is Musk. But I will guess that we will see this coming Friday as that is when Twitter Blue launches.