Elon Musk is firing Twitter employees because the engagement on his account is declining.
“You’re fired, you’re fired,” Musk allegedly told the top engineer who had offered this narrative. [right-wing trolls](https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/elon-musk-twitter-advice-right-wing-troll-1234630432/), who had come to the paradoxical conclusion that setting your account to private actually boosts your views, Musk [locked down](https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/elon-musck-locks-account-right-wing-censorship-1234672293/) his own profile. In any event, Musk’s frustrations with the viewership gauge evidently continued, and when he raised the question of his flop tweets at this week’s meeting, he got an answer that didn’t suit him at all. “This is ridiculous,” he reportedly said in the Tuesday meeting. [views](https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/21/23522064/twitter-view-count-roll-out-personal-info),” a feature of dubious value that new owner [Elon Musk](https://www.rollingstone.com/t/elon-musk/) hoped would demonstrate the [true reach](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1605957811162054656) of user’s posts. the “Chief Twit.” Despite boasting an audience of 128.5 million followers, the company’s CEO is reportedly dissatisfied with his level of visibility on the site.
German lawmakers want to know if a post-layoff Twitter can handle content moderation. But first…
Elon Musk is worried about his declining reach on Twitter and fired an engineer as he tries to get it figured out. Meanwhile, employees are looking for a ...
“He needs to learn the areas where he just does not know things and let those that do know take over.” “I know for a fact that most of my team is doing hardcore interview prep and would jump at likely any opportunity to walk away.” “You can’t be the smartest person in the room about everything, all the time.” “FTC compliance is concerning,” one says. “People don’t even chat about work things anymore,” the employee said. “We haven’t seen much in the way of longer term, cogent strategy,” one employee said. “And then he’ll come to us and be like, ‘this one person says they can’t do this one thing on the platform,’ and then we have to run around chasing some outlier use case for one person. “This is ridiculous,” he said, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. Last April, they told him, Musk was at “peak” popularity in search rankings, indicated by a score of “100.” Today, he’s at a score of nine. (Platformer is withholding the engineer’s name in light of the harassment Musk has directed at former Twitter employees.) The disarray makes it less likely that Musk will ever recoup the $44 billion he spent to buy Twitter and may hasten its decline into insolvency. [took his Twitter account private for a day](https://mashable.com/article/twitter-locked-private-elon-musk-account) to test whether that might boost the size of his audience.
Elon Musk reportedly firing an engineer who gave the billionaire bad news about engagement on the site, according to a new report from Platformer.
Twitter accounts with large followings have reported much less engagement on the social media platform in recent months, a problem that CEO Elon Musk said he would investigate and report back to users. Their job seems to depend on it. One senior engineer floated that perhaps people were getting tired of the constant drama that surrounded Musk in the first two months of his ownership of Twitter. Musk bought the company in late October 2022 for $44 billion and seemed to make news every day during that tumultuous period—whether it was firing thousands of staff, trying to coax some staff back after realizing he needed them, or even getting And any other explanation was unacceptable. But Musk was not happy with that response.
Since Elon Musk took over as the company's CEO last year, he has fired a large portion of employees in order to cut costs, in addition to the ones that ...
With how often Elon Musk is making headlines, it’s no surprise that there has been a waning interest in him over the past year. Ironically, it’s easy to see the decreased engagement in Elon Musk’s tweets over the months by looking at their view count, which is a feature he introduced to the platform. According to the report, the engineer suggested that it could be because the public has lost interest in Musk’s antics.
Platform's co-founder uses new social network to fault Twitter's owner · What's News · Iger Shakes Up Disney's Entertainment Operations, Rethinks Hulu Ownership.
Here’s How They’ve Spent $140 Million.](https://www.wsj.com/articles/stewart-butterfield-slack-jen-rubio-away-homes-11675953066?mod=trending_now_news_5) Says](https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-balloon-carried-antennas-other-equipment-to-gather-intelligence-u-s-says-11675953033?mod=trending_now_news_2) [A Second New Jersey Council Member Fatally Shot This Month](https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-jersey-council-member-shooting-russell-heller-11675953967?mod=trending_now_news_3) [The Secret to Being a Star at Work Right Now](https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-secret-to-being-a-star-at-work-right-now-11675910488?mod=trending_now_news_4) [Silicon Valley’s Newest ‘It’ Couple Is Going Big on Real Estate. What’s Actually Happening in the Jobs Market](https://www.wsj.com/articles/jobs-hiring-boom-layoffs-employment-11675947399?mod=trending_now_news_1) [Chinese Balloon Carried Equipment to Gather Intelligence, U.S. [Top Walmart coupons for February 2023](https://www.wsj.com/coupons/walmart) [Kohl's Coupon 30% off sitewide](https://www.wsj.com/coupons/kohls) [Wayfair coupon $20 off](https://www.wsj.com/coupons/wayfair)
The billionaire had previously assigned workers to look into whether his reach on Twitter had dropped due to a potential issue with the algorithm.
[Musk fired three Twitter employees](https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-staff-slam-elon-musk-did-you-bother-to-learn-2022-11) that criticized him on social media. [set his Twitter profile to Private](https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-twitter-private-tweet-1850061253) to test whether it could increase the view count on his tweets. [suffered an outage](https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-outage-elon-musk-cost-cutting-2023-2) that left several users unable to send tweets or direct messages after the company attempted to roll out several new features. When one of the engineers said Musk's popularity might be declining due to a lack of public interest since his Twitter purchase, Musk told the employee he was fired, according to Platformer. Musk met with several Twitter engineers on Tuesday to discuss his view count on Twitter, which had been on a downward spiral in recent months, Platformer reported. "This is ridiculous," Musk told the employees, Platformer said, citing multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting.
Sometime around mid-December, we resigned ourselves to the fact that Twitter will never be Twitter again, and that if it's not felled by bankruptcy, it'll ...
[Social Media](https://www.pajiba.com/web_culture/) [Dustin Rowles](https://www.pajiba.com/staff/dustin-rowles-1.php) Employees no longer communicate on Slack, most of them are interviewing elsewhere, and answers to questions Musk asks are generally the safe ones. Employees showed Musk internal data regarding engagement with his account, along with a Google Trends chart. [when the DMs of millions of users disappeared](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/08/technology/twitter-glitches-features.html) and we couldn’t Tweet without “scheduling” a tweet for an hour and a half, it felt less frustrating than inevitable. “This is ridiculous,” he said, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. Twitter stopped being the main story on Twitter, and we all moved on. [Platformer](https://www.platformer.news/p/elon-musk-fires-a-top-twitter-engineer). It’s lost half of its advertising revenue, Twitter Blue has only brought in $28 million (or less than 1 percent of its revenue), Musk has interest payments to make, and none of the “improvements” Musk has made have improved the service. People stopped reading and engaging with his tweets, and Musk didn’t understand why. Sometime around mid-December, we resigned ourselves to the fact that Twitter will never be Twitter again, and that if it’s not felled by bankruptcy, it’ll either degrade or the majority of users will lose interest and move on. He didn’t understand that we, collectively, lost interest in him sometime around the time that Kevin McCarthy was
Musk reportedly sacked one of Twitter's engineers after they suggested his lower-than-normal engagement might be because people aren't interested in him.
[experienced a mass outage](https://gizmodo.com/twitter-facebook-instagram-youtube-outages-1850091709). [unpopular changes](https://gizmodo.com/twitter-checkmarks-and-labels-guide-blue-gold-gray-chec-1849930068) that nobody asked for. [the view counter](https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/21/23522064/twitter-view-count-roll-out-personal-info) that Musk has become so frustrated with might be totally wrong. One [recently published report](https://www.covidstates.org/reports/twitter-social-media-and-elon-musk) found that the site’s number of active U.S. [$44 billion buying it](https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-twitter-takeover-chaos-explained-1849768358). [losing advertising revenue](https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-twitter-ads-problems-analytics-layoffs-1849835749) and users alike.
The billionaire had previously assigned workers to look into whether his reach on Twitter had dropped due to a potential issue with the algorithm.
Elon Musk reportedly fired one engineer who used Google Trends to explain that interest in the Twitter CEO had fallen since a peak last April.
Musk later [claimed](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1621025421637857280?s=20&t=lGtRaq68Owaj3SLduqQKfA) that the test “helped identify some issues with the system.” [made his account](https://fortune.com/2023/02/02/elon-musk-locked-twitter-account-to-test-right-wing-complaints/) private to test claims from conservative commentators who argued that the measure boosted their engagement. Twitter’s website says that the view count includes any time a logged-in user sees a tweet. Twitter started displaying view counts in late December. (For example, tweets from former And Musk
No one doubts that Elon Musk has strong opinions about how Twitter should be run. Even before he spent $44 billion to be able to do whatever he wants with ...
Also, his experience using Twitter is only one part of his motivation. Musk is certainly a Twitter power user, but his experience of Twitter isn't the same as most people's experience. That means his experience of using Twitter isn't anything close to that of most users. He attempted to spin this as a feature--the author of the tweet would supposedly receive some kind of revenue share from the ads, but it's not clear how much, or how that would even work. Since Musk's plan to make Twitter profitable depended largely on getting people to pay him a monthly subscription, he's had to look elsewhere to make up the difference. On the one hand, Twitter was very much a company in need of someone willing to shake things up.
Jack Dorsey, Twitter's cofounder and former CEO, mocked Elon Musk's company over its major outage on Wednesday. "Used to be when anything went down, ...
Since Musk took over the company, [employee numbers have fallen more than two-thirds,](https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-says-twitter-now-has-2300-active-working-employees-2023-1) from over 7,000 to around 2,300 – [per the billionaire himself.](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1616706530841333761) I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness." [Platformer reported](https://www.platformer.news/p/elon-musk-fires-a-top-twitter-engineer) that the fiasco occurred because an employee had accidentally deleted data for the service which sets rate limits, and the team responsible for that had left Twitter in November. [tweeted:](https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/1623463646444634113) "Twitter may not be working as expected for some of you. Now look," Dorsey Now look," Dorsey said.
Many Twitter users found themselves unable to tweet, follow accounts or access their direct messages on Wednesday as the Elon Musk-owned platform ...
Twitter has long limited the number of tweets an account can send. We're aware and working to get this fixed," the company tweeted from its "support" account. Sorry for the trouble.
The co-founder appears to be distancing himself, after Musk used the Twitter Files to condemn previous management and paint Dorsey as clueless and inept.
His credibility as cofounder helped garner an invitation for the centibillionaire to join as a director. Company took away my access to email or I would.” (Musk [ensuing right-wing outrage](https://fortune.com/2023/02/09/twitter-files-yoel-roth-defamatory-tweet-elon-musk-homophobic-antisemitic-threats/) read more like a damning critique of the latter’s management style, painting him as a well-meaning but ultimately clueless and inept leader out of his depth. Dorsey has also taken issue with Musk’s characterization of Twitter as a safe space for child pornography traffickers. Dorsey has found himself forced to watch from the sidelines as Musk repeatedly bad-mouths his most famous creation, notably through the so-called Twitter Files. “Jack has a pure heart.”
Elon Musk, obsessed with how his Twitter engagement rate has plummeted, reportedly fired an engineer who attempted to explain that the reason his account's ...
Twitter is scrambling to increase its revenue streams as it pays for the acquisition price tag Musk offered. On the day Twitter accepted the acquisition deal last year, Dorsey stated, “Elon is the singular solution I trust. Meanwhile, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey meanwhile has moved to a new decentralized social network called Nostr and is using it to criticize Musk. “This is ridiculous,” he said, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. Dorsey’s remarks are noteworthy because the two executives appear to have had a cordial relationship, and the Twitter co-founder initially applauded Musk’s acquisition. Last week, he made his account private for a day to see if it would increase the amount of his audience, after Several popular right-wing accounts with whom Musk communicates complained that recent adjustments to Twitter had decreased their reach.
Engineers tried to explain that public interest in Elon Musk's antics is waning after his surprise offer to buy Twitter.
Musk's chaotic rule of the site finally brought it to its knees on Wednesday night in an outage that disabled tweeting, retweeting, and following.
"Please pause for now on new feature development in favor of maximizing system stability and robustness, especially with the Super Bowl coming up,” Musk wrote in one email. Finally, it appears that it all broke under the strain. [let users post tweets with thousands of characters](https://twitter.com/wongmjane/status/1623038721221365760?s=20&t=LU9aG7Isz67pHJVh5Ci7BQ), for instance. Cracks were already appearing before the outage; a bug this week When attempting any of these actions, users were presented with an error message informing them that they had reached their daily limit. Some famous users were affected, such as Steve Martin, who
Twitter boss Elon Musk seems to have fired an employee after he did not like his explanation about reduction in engagement on his posts on Twitter.
The views expressed here are that of the respective authors/ entities and do not represent the views of Economic Times (ET). [Google Trends](/topic/google-trends)was shown by the engineer. The CEO of
The Twitter CEO, who bought the social media giant for $44bn in October last year, was reportedly consumed with the declining views of his tweets for weeks ...
[previously reported](https://twitter.com/ZoeSchiffer/status/1615519936805482496) that Twitter’s daily revenue was down 40 per cent year-over-year in January 2023, following a flurry of changes implemented by Mr Musk that prompted an increase in [hate speech](http://go.redirectingat.com/?id=44681X1458326&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2022%2F12%2F02%2Ftechnology%2Ftwitter-hate-speech.html&sref=https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/elon-musk-twitter-fired-engineer-b2279914.html) and misinformation. Previously, advertising sales accounted for 90 per cent of Twitter’s revenue. Those changes included [mass firings](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/elon-musk-twitter-news-final-days-b2252464.html) from departments all over the world, including in content moderation, and the reinstating of [neo-Nazis and other accounts](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/elon-musk-twitter-suspended-accounts-b2239851.html) previously banned from the platform. [major outage](https://www.independent.co.uk/business/twitter-users-hit-by-rate-limit-warnings-as-thousands-left-unable-to-tweet-b2278816.html) and come under fire from the [European Union](https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/09/elon-musk-twitter-eu-disinformation-code-report/) for a lack of transparency on fighting disinformation. The report comes at a turbulent time for the social network, which in the last week alone has faced a The report comes at a turbulent time for the Twitter CEO
Musk reportedly called a meeting of engineers and advisors at Twitter to discuss his falling engagement metrics, then fired an engineer for explaining the ...
Twitter previously commmitted to following steps like creating project proposals and conducting security and privacy reviews before making changes, part of an agreement with the U.S. Perks that used to make Twitter an attractive place to work have been removed or destroyed. Beyond that, the Platformer reported on several other problems within Twitter based on interviews with current employees. Platformer reports an FTC audit is coming this quarter and employees doubt the company has the necessary documentation in place to pass inspection. [Platformer ](https://www.platformer.news/p/elon-musk-fires-a-top-twitter-engineer)newsletter (as republished by [The Verge](https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/9/23593099/elon-musk-twitter-fires-engineer-declining-reach-ftc-concerns)), it’s chaos inside Twitter under Elon Musk and employees are worried. The latest peak at the internal workings of Twitter is bleak, to say the least.
Elon Musk said Friday that legacy blue checkmarks would be removed soon, the latest warning from the billionaire that people who received verification under ...
Under Twitter’s former management, verification was a free process carried out by the company itself to recognize notable public figures, so that they would not be confused with other accounts. [pretended to be the drug maker Eli Lilly](https://fortune.com/2022/11/11/no-free-insulin-eli-lilly-casualty-of-elon-musk-twitter-blue-verification-mess/), and announced that insulin was now free (it is not.) [warned in December](https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/12/elon-says-twitter-will-remove-all-legacy-verifications-in-a-few-months/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAMTY6MffIPEBFAmTiOu5QwIbfKcTLYB-HvfPe0XTfD3lyFV-GBFWc3V8f-wR36ZFYtcnynhUJvfyIohnXv1al1qy6U6gM2EMomrae8aPJnNkOtypC8gHNp8yRnZ86SMv_wKNkvX1rILEmtqkImnfIZ2GG-uHWsFDUp4oxq4PpPb5) that they would be removed “in a few months.”
Musk fired an engineer who said there was no evidence the algorithm was biased against him.
"He really doesn't like to believe that there is anything in technology that he doesn't know, and that's frustrating," the same employee said. "He needs to learn the areas where he just does not know things and let those that do know take over." "I know for a fact that most of my team is doing hardcore interview prep, and would jump at likely any opportunity to walk away." "When you're asked a question, you run it through your head and say 'what is the least fireable response I can have to this right now?'" one employee explained. "His stance is basically 'f*ck you regulators,'" one employee said. "And, I know this sounds petty, but they appear to have obtained the absolute worst coffee vendors on earth," the employee added. "And then he'll come to us and be like, 'this one person says they can't do this one thing on the platform,' and then we have to run around chasing some outlier use case for one person. Many employees at the San Francisco headquarters — whose landlord has sued Twitter for nonpayment of rent — already have one foot out the door, with the standard greeting among workers being "where are you interviewing?" "Most of our time is dedicated to three main areas: putting out fires (mostly caused by firing the wrong people and trying to recover from that), performing impossible tasks, and 'improving efficiency' without clear guidelines of what the expected end results are. One of the two remaining principal engineers at Twitter said that one possible reason for the lower engagement was due to public interest in him and his behavior declining. "We haven't seen much in the way of longer term, cogent strategy," one employee said. On Wednesday, the app had a major outage when users were inexplicably told "You are over the daily limit for sending tweets."
For years, Twitter, like other social media platforms, has freely given its platform data to independent researchers so that they can analyze everything ...
“Twitter’s new CEO Elon Musk has promised to make the platform more transparent and to reduce the prevalence of spam and manipulative accounts,” the letter said. “More work is needed when it comes to providing access to data for researchers,” said Věra Jourová, the European Union’s vice-president for values and transparency, in a statement. “We must have more transparency and cannot rely on the online platforms alone for the quality of information. “Twitter essentially has gone, in a blink of an eye, from being an industry leader in transparency to the bottom of the barrel.” The reports to the EU are seen as an important baseline marker for compliance with the Code of Practice on Disinformation, a voluntary set of self-regulatory commitments that can reduce a tech company’s potential liability under the Digital Services Act, a recently passed EU content moderation law that will be enforced beginning in 2024. “Meta was able to point to new programs they were developing,” Tromble said. “The team is gone,” she said. If Twitter had that community in mind, it would be absolutely appropriate for them to reach out and have some conversations and perhaps introduce a sliding scale approach to this.” [“good” Twitter bots ](https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/2/23582982/twitter-api-free-access-cutoff-bot-developers-shutdown)that also could be harmed by the change. Kaicheng Yang, one of the creators of Botometer, told CNN Thursday that Twitter’s coming API changes “would definitely make my work harder” and raise the project’s costs. Ironically, however, Musk’s looming changes to the Twitter API might make it harder to study bot behavior on Twitter. For years, Twitter, like other social media platforms, has freely given its platform data to independent researchers so that they can analyze everything from online trolling to the spread of misinformation.
Many Twitter accounts that were verified before Elon Musk bought the platform will soon lose the coveted blue checkmarks that were once handed out for free, ...
The new Twitter Blue product has resulted in several notable mishaps in which users impersonated celebrities and businesses, including a November [fiasco](https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisadellatto/2022/11/10/eli-lilly-clarifies-its-not-offering-free-insulin-after-tweet-from-fake-verified-account-as-chaos-unfolds-on-twitter/?sh=5fa78af951a3) in which a newly-verified Twitter Blue user pretended to be pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and said the company would soon offer free insulin. “Tesla needs to build its image around Tesla, and not just around Elon,” Gerber said. [estimates](https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/#7ca7e97b3d78), $23 billion less than the world's richest man Bernard Arnault and $68 billion more than the U.S.’ second-wealthiest Jeff Bezos. [previously attacked](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1602407011106361362?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1602407011106361362%7Ctwgr%5E9602c351d5b2816872d816a4933ea3015e5866c7%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Ftechcrunch.com%2F2022%2F12%2F12%2Felon-says-twitter-will-remove-all-legacy-verifications-in-a-few-months%2F) Twitter’s old notability-based verification process as “nonsensical.” In his four months in charge of Twitter, Musk has made several polarizing changes to the company and the site in an effort to cut costs and rid the company of what Musk has described as a liberal bias in content moderation. In addition to Twitter Blue users, the Musk Twitter regime has also verified certain government and business accounts, but may soon charge companies $1,000 to retain their gold checkmarks, the Information [reported](https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/twitter-considers-charging-brands-1000-per-month-to-stay-verified?irclickid=2n%3A0kFWoPxyITofQl2WsbxHIUkA3em3RRXtgww0&irgwc=1&utm_source=affiliate&utm_medium=cpa&utm_campaign=10078-Skimbit+Ltd.&utm_term=businessinsider.com). After Musk’s takeover, Twitter began distinguishing between free and paid blue checks by adding the message, “This is a legacy verified account.
Employees at Twitter describe what the company's culture has become since Musk's takeover, and it's not pretty.
Some of the company’s former employees are also taking [legal action](https://fortune.com/2023/02/06/twitter-elon-musk-lawsuit-severance-lisa-bloom-attorney-layoffs-arbitration/) against Musk and Twitter for what ex-staffers say is the company’s decision to back out of contractual obligations and not pay them the severance they were promised. [internal Slack channel](https://fortune.com/2022/11/15/elon-musk-twitter-engineer-fired/) were fired from the company. The “Chief Twit” even went so far as [to fire some employees](https://fortune.com/2022/11/15/elon-musk-twitter-engineer-fired/) via tweet while having a heated online exchange last November. [to sue Musk](https://fortune.com/2023/01/03/elon-musk-twitter-office-rent-lawsuit-cost-cutting-layoffs-headquarters/) earlier this year. [bought the social media platform last October for $44 billion](https://fortune.com/2022/10/27/elon-musk-twitter-acquisition-closes/). He later axed around [half of the company’s employees](https://fortune.com/2022/11/03/elon-musk-twitter-layoffs-half-all-jobs-3700-remote-work/), and many more left on their own.
In a tweet shared on Friday, Elon Musk confirmed his plans to get rid of blue checkmarks for “legacy verified” accounts on the social media platform.
He reportedly did not take the news well, and told the engineer, “You’re fired.” He’s also allegedly told his employees to track how many times his tweets are recommended to Twitter users. [Platformer](https://www.platformer.news/p/elon-musk-fires-a-top-twitter-engineer?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email) earlier this week, Musk reportedly complained to his employees in a meeting about the number of impressions he’s getting on his tweets. He initially announced his plans to remove the legacy checkmarks back in December. “Legacy blue checks will be removed soon,” he wrote. “In a few months, we will remove all legacy blue checks,” he wrote. When a Twitter user tweeted at Musk to suggest that the verification checkmarks on the platform have “become a joke” now that anyone can get them by subscribing to Twitter Blue, Musk responded and made his plans clear.
Twitter CEO Elon Musk fired a key employee after he refused to increase his view counts.