Some now-fired Twitter employees are unintentionally making headlines left and right over their post-termination behavior, including their crying and whining.
Now on one hand, it’s very understandable that these former employees are upset. Being fired is a horrible experience. But on the other hand, say critics, these employees were responsible for God knows how many Americans being silenced and censored.
Elon Musk has promised to investigate why several far-right personalities in Brazil were removed from Twitter after some high-profile names, including the grandson of a former military dictator, complained they were being denied free speech.
Twitter Brasil suspended profiles of three rightwing politicians recently elected to congress: Carla Zambelli, Gustavo Gayer, and Nikolas Ferreira, a 26-year-old who won 1.5m votes and has 2 million followers.
Twitter will be a more free platform, but it won’t be a truly free one.
Let’s remember who Elon Musk is. He’s a guy who got very rich peddling technofuturism to elites while cashing in on government subsidies. He’s a throwback to a libertarian Silicon Valley and he believes in free speech and debate… in principle.
The Joe Rogan political wing likes the idea of speech. It likes that speech to be on its own terms and it wants to be in charge. It likes controversy, but the kind it agrees with, and that makes it money.
Elon Musk on Saturday confirmed claims that Twitter employees were selling verification badges for certain users.
“Twitter employees were selling verification for upwards of $15,000. For certain accounts, mine included, they would refuse to verify you through the standard application and then privately offer to verify you for $$ behind the scenes. Investigation needed,” a user, WSBChairman—which has 900,000 followers—claimed Saturday on the platform. Musk confirmed that users claim, responding: “Yup.”
“I actually wanted to get laid off.”
… “In general, the culture at Twitter is pretty politically progressive. For the supermajority of people, the sentiment toward Elon is negative—and now this, it’s hellish. The company culture is going to change a lot under Elon. When he brought his own people in, it felt like [how] Obama employees must have felt when they were going through the Trump transition. That sense of intrusion. None of the people coming back are people who Twitter employees would like to work with.
“Twitter occupies an interesting part of the social-media landscape. I don’t think there’s any service I know of that can replace it. Using Twitter is kind of like a Rorschach test: your feed is going to look like the kind of people you follow. I love Twitter, because I think I follow the right kind of people. I don’t think any other platform has the same number of academics, writers, poets, and movie directors who just hang out and post whatever thing they like to post. It’s smart, witty, dumb, funny.
More … Antifa protester among those who lost job in Elon Musk’s massive Twitter layoffs
As promised, Elon Musk’s Twitter announced Saturday that users can get verified with the once sought-after blue check for $7.99 a month.
“Get Twitter Blue if you sign up now,” the announcement said. “Blue checkmark: Power to the people. Your account will get a blue checkmark, just like the celebrities, companies and politicians you follow.”
“Coming soon… Half the ads & much better ones,” the statement added. “Since you’re supporting Twitter in the battle against the bots, we’re going to reward you with half the ads and make them twice as relevant.”
Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk says he had “no choice” but to slash the company’s workforce as the firm is losing more than $4m (£3.5m) a day.
Half of the company’s staff are being let go, a week after Mr Musk bought Twitter in a $44bn (£38.7bn) deal.
Twitter staff have been using the platform to talk about their dismissal.
There are concerns Twitter could water down content moderation but Mr Musk said the firm’s policies remain “absolutely unchanged”.
BREAKING: Twitter’s *board of right wing meme censorship* engineer was fired today! pic.twitter.com/kYBB0pcGF0
— Damon Imani🔅 (@damonimani) November 4, 2022
Nov 3 (Reuters) – Twitter will tell employees by email on Friday about whether they have been laid off, temporarily closing its offices and preventing staff access, following a week of uncertainty about the company’s future under new owner Elon Musk.
The social media company said in an email to staff that it will alert employees by 9 a.m. Pacific time on Friday (12 p.m. EDT/1600 GMT) about staff cuts.
“In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday,” said the email sent on Thursday, seen by Reuters.
Twitter layoffs begin in 12 hours. They have so many employees folks just have to sit in front of their computers and wait. Building has been locked down. Badges have been disabled. pic.twitter.com/JQvIpIb2a8
— TheQuartering (@TheQuartering) November 4, 2022
Even for a guy like Elon Musk, $44 billion is quite a chunk of money to spend on anything, even for the most valuable and influential social media platform in the world.
As often happens in the business world, cost-cutting measures are typically deployed upon acquiring a new business. According to a bombshell Bloomberg report Wednesday night, it appears the first money-saving cuts could come Friday in the way of firing roughly half of Twitter’s entire workforce.
Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter has shaken the fascist Left to its core; nothing seems to be more frightening to Leftists than the prospect of free and open discourse. But the euphoria among patriots and fear and rage among Leftists may both have been premature: Musk announced early Wednesday morning that he had talked with a group of “civil society leaders” about how “Twitter will continue to combat hate & harassment & enforce its election integrity policies.”
Watch what he does, not what he says.
It has now been a week since Elon Musk took over Twitter, and the wailing and gnashing of teeth is still audible across the legacy media landscape. In one sense, that’s rather shocking: Why, precisely, should members of the media be so apoplectic about a billionaire taking over a social media company from other millionaires, pledging to loosen restrictions on dissemination of speech? In another sense, the outrage is perfectly predictable: The legacy media oligopoly is now under threat.
In more than a decade on Twitter, Walter Kirn watched as the platform manipulated reality in real-time. Now? ‘Let the wild rumpus begin.’
Let me tell you about my strange time on Twitter, a so-called “social-media platform” of the early 21st century. In what I suspect is the increasing likelihood that digital records of our lives now will someday be erased, mislaid, or virtually composted in such a way as to make them irretrievable, the little story I’m about to tell may make little sense to future generations. It takes place during the period when the American establishment sought to control the flow of information in much the same way it once pursued dominion over resources such as land and oil.
This power grab caused a sort of virtual cold war, and I, as a consumer, a producer, and a conduit of information, got caught in it. Here is how the experience felt and how it went and a statement of what I hope will happen next, now that the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk promises a better, freer day.
If you want to see media manipulation at work closer to home read the comments at CBC announcing Trudeau’s plan to flood the nation with 500K of immigrants a year. The majority are not in favour of Justin’s plan to sell us out to his corporate friends. The immigration announcement was timed for release after a story was planted in Canadian media outlets this week pushing the lie that Canadians are overwhelmingly in favour of mass immigration. We are governed by criminals.
New Twitter CEO Elon Musk has made another move to prevent viewpoint discrimination while he sorts out the dumpster fire known as Twitter’s “Trust and Safety” department. Bloomberg reports that employees got locked out of some internal tools used for content moderation
The media were camped out in San Francisco as sullen employees learned their fate
“The bird is freed,” tweeted Elon Musk last Thursday, when he acquired full ownership of Twitter. The day before, he strode into Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters carrying a white ceramic wash basin to impart the message that his new ownership should “sink in.”
