A year of Twitter under Musk: whims, riots and disinformation

This article was last updated on October 30, 2023

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A year of Twitter under Musk: whims, riots and disinformation

A year ago, Elon Musk entered Twitter’s headquarters with a sink, with the words: ‘Let that sink in’. The billionaire kicked off an anything but normal first year as Twitter owner in an unorthodox way.

The social platform now has a new name (X), there are plenty of concerns about disinformation and only a portion of the original workforce remains. What does the company look like after one year under Musk?

Musk got Twitter in hands after months of takeover soap opera. The billionaire, known as CEO of car brand Tesla and space company SpaceX, paid around $44 billion for the platform. Pretty much the first thing he did after that was take Twitter private.

He had already announced that Twitter would continue as a private company during the first years under him. This way he could implement the necessary reforms, without the obligation to submit quarterly figures every few months, for example.

He didn’t wait long to make the change. For example, he implemented several major rounds of layoffs. Of the original 7,500 employees, only about 1,500 now remain.

He also introduced one of his biggest reforms in those first weeks: the end of the so-called blue check mark as an ‘authenticity mark’ for, for example, well-known politicians, companies or athletes. Instead, it became possible for every user to receive a blue check mark for a fee (8 dollars per month).

According to Musk, this helped in the fight against spam and fake accounts. Accounts that pay money for a check mark are said to be less likely to send spam. This would also make Twitter less dependent on advertisers.

But the introduction of the system led directly to abuse and chaos. Paying users posed as celebrities and appeared to spread a lot of disinformation or hate messages. It caused significant damage to Twitter’s image.

The same applied to many other decisions in those first months. For example, the social medium decided to no longer enforce the old fake news policy. According to Musk, there were too many rules on the ‘old’ Twitter and therefore too little freedom of expression. Under the new rate, accounts that had previously been suspended for fake news or discrimination were allowed to return.

‘It seems that Musk sees Twitter more as an ideological project’

Meanwhile, accounts of several prominent tech journalists were exposed at the end of last year suspended, after writing about Musk’s travel habits. It caused quite a stir. Also a plots set ban references to other social media led to surprise. A few days later that decision was reversed.

It is typical of the erratic nature of Twitter’s first twelve months under Musk. Musk made policy choices, such as suspending the suspension of former President Trump’s account, dependent on unrepresentative online polls among Twitter users.

After a storm of criticism, Musk voted on his own fate as CEO in a similar poll in December; a large majority thought he should to leave. It took almost six months, until May, before the platform actually created a solution new leader had: Linda Yaccarino, previously serving as advertising director at NBCUniversal.

Since then, Musk has been ‘chief technology officer’, but in practice he is simply the boss. For example, it was Musk who suddenly announced in July that the name Twitter would disappear, including the famous blue bird. Since then, Twitter has been known as X.

Tech editor Nando Kasteleijn:

“As soon as it became clear that Elon Musk actually became the owner of Twitter, there was a lot of interest in alternatives. Think of Mastodon, Bluesky and more recently Threads, made by Meta. They all received the necessary attention in the past year.

None of them have really managed to take the place of Twitter, now X. Instead, the landscape seems to fragment further. Anyone who wants to leave X faces a choice: a hard break or a soft transition. It should be noted that there is also a group of users who are pleased with the changes.”

The new name has not changed the current tenor around the platform – namely as a place where misinformation is rampant. In fact, this month the European Commission said to investigate whether X is doing enough against the spread of hate messages, disinformation and terrorist content.

Conspiracy theory researcher Mike Rothschild described to the news agency Bloomberg the war between Hamas and Israel as the first real test for Elon Musk’s version of Twitter. And that version, according to him, failed “spectacularly”.

After the Hamas attack on October 7, the platform was filled with manipulated photos and videos from other wars or even video games, often posted by accounts with blue checkmarks.

“It is now virtually impossible to determine whether something is fact, rumor or conspiracy theory,” says Rothschild. “The changes Musk has made to X haven’t just made the platform useless in a crisis. They’ve made it worse.”

Multiple studies by universities and internet watchdogs have already shown that since Musk’s takeover, the number of hate tweets on the platform has increased significantly. increased. At the same time, advertising revenues are declining. Reuters news agency reported one at the beginning of this month decrease of at least 55 percent since the takeover.

A different company in everything

News site Axios also wrote that the app less frequently is downloaded and the number of active daily users decreases. There are no figures from

CEO Yaccarino underlined at the end of last month that ninety of the hundred most important advertisers had returned in the past twelve weeks. She expects X to make a profit in the first quarter of 2024.

The platform itself endorsed that optimistic message yesterday a blog post, looking back on the first year. The future of X is bright, was the core message, based on 23 points that the company is currently working on.

Critics of X undoubtedly have a different opinion. The one thing she and Musk most likely agree on? X no longer resembles the company he walked into a year ago with a sink.