Elon Musk has fallen short as Twitter chief, and not just in the ways you might think

As periods of change go, Twitter has just been through the most severe in its history. Just over a year ago, billionaire Elon Musk began his acquisition bid for the company, pledging to defeat the spam bots plaguing Twitter and turn it into a haven for free speech.

In the six months since that deal closed, Twitter has been dramatically altered – and not always for the better.

Within weeks of buying the social media platform, Musk gutted staff, cut moderation teams and announced changes to policies on the site, at times with dizzying speed. New features were rolled out, and then rolled back when they didn’t perform as expected.

There were dire predictions of the death of Twitter, taken down perhaps by a bug that no one left at the company had the skills to fix. Advertisers left the platform in droves, although Musk now claims they are either back or have committed to returning.

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In the past few months, there have been an increasing number of bugs and failures on Twitter

So far, Twitter hasn’t collapsed in on itself, at least not in the way it was predicted. Musk has cut costs, as he promised, and has restored many of the accounts banned under the previous ownership. He has begun the process of shifting users to a subscription model too, and limited the access of automated accounts on the platform. That in itself has caused issues, with some public services no longer able to rely on Twitter as a means to disseminate information.

And the Doge meme dog was briefly the icon on Twitter’s desktop, a suggestion made by a user some time ago.

But in other ways, Musk has fallen far short of what he promised. Fellow free speech absolutists may have been surprised to see Twitter ban accounts of prominent journalists, kick rapper Kanye West off the platform for anti-Semitic tweets and comply with government requests to limit access to certain tweets. Under Musk, links to alternative platforms such as Mastodon and Substack were no longer acceptable, although some of those policies have since been abandoned.

Twitter has also cut off free access to its application programming interface (API), something researchers relied on.

The name

Twitter Inc is no more; the company now lives on as part of X Corp. The change came quietly, spotted as part of one of the many legal cases the social media platform is facing in the US. But it isn’t exactly unexpected.

You might remember X as part of Musk’s grand plan for Twitter, where he saw the company functioning as a sort of WeChat for the West, encompassing everything from social media and messaging to payments. Back in October last year, he tweeted: “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.” Now it seems he is taking that a step closer.

The people

When Musk first entered the Twitter building, he turned up holding a sink as part of a gag he could post to his Twitter account. “I just bought Twitter. Let that sink in,” he wrote.

But he also brought a new broom. A big one. Within hours, he had fired the entire board and left himself as chief executive. Less than a month after he bought the platform, Twitter began wholesale lay-offs in a process that insiders described as chaotic. Staff were “notified” that they had lost their jobs as their access to internal systems was cut off, sometimes mid meeting. Others were told they were no longer needed, only to be asked to return within days.

It turns out that paying for a blue badge doesn’t hold quite the same appeal as having it bestowed on you by the powers that be

Although employment law outside the US differs, it didn’t make the process any clearer here. Staff were locked out of the Twitter Dublin headquarters in advance of the job cuts.

Moderation teams were reduced. The communications team has been largely dismantled, and any requests sent to the official Twitter press email address generate an auto response featuring a poop emoji. Further rounds of job cuts, meanwhile, have left Twitter with a skeleton staff.

The culture

Aside from the childish jokes – the sign outside the San Francisco office had the ’w’ painted out to make the sign “Titter” – Musk has radically altered the company culture at Twitter.

When Covid hit, the then Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey made a decision to allow staff to work from home on a permanent basis if they wished to. Under his successor, Parag Agrawal, that policy continued.

But Musk has a different outlook. He had already ordered Tesla staff back to the office, so it was no surprise to see the remote working policy at Twitter rescinded. That caused concerns for people who had moved during the pandemic, and could no longer easily reach a Twitter office.

Twitter might be the only big tech company where staff were forced to bring in their own toilet roll

The expectations have changed too, with staff working longer hours to accommodate the new owner’s working style. Pictures posted to Twitter showed some staff sleeping in the office, although it turned out that level of commitment wasn’t enough to save their jobs in the end.

Twitter has also cut out a lot of the perks for which Silicon Valley companies had become famous: free lunches, for example. It isn’t the only one rowing back on such things. Other tech companies are tightening up on Silicon Valley staples such as easy access to free snacks and yoga classes. But it might be the only big tech company where staff were forced to bring in their own toilet roll.

Features

Musk promised to deal with the spam bots and, in a way, that is what Twitter Blue could do. But instead of verification for all, it is now “blue badge if you can pay”, which isn’t quite the same thing.

The blue badge was initially given by Twitter to accounts with a verified identity – in theory – and were usually handed out to well-known public figures, government officials, journalists and so on. Viewing this as elitist, Musk decided that he would offer the badge to anyone willing to pay a monthly fee, and rescind the legacy verified accounts if they didn’t cough up.

It turns out that paying for a blue badge doesn’t hold quite the same appeal as having it bestowed on you by the powers that be. Twitter Blue isn’t pulling in the numbers that may have been expected, and it has instead become a source of ridicule for some. That may change as the previously verified accounts see their blue badges disappear, with the deadline set at April 20th – for now.

But Musk hasn’t stopped there. Gold badges for organisations. Grey ones for government organisations or members. Blue ones for regular users who pay for Twitter Blue. Square versus round. There are so many badges these days that it’s hard to keep up.

Verification for organisations is not cheap, at just short of €10,000 for the year, plus an additional €50 for each affiliate account. The New York Times publicly said it would not pay for verification, nor would it reimburse staff who shelled out for Twitter Blue. Others followed suit, but only the NYT had its blue badge immediately removed from their account.

Advertisers left the platform in droves, although Musk now claims they are either back or have committed to returning

Public broadcasters such as NPR and PBS have stopped using the platform due to the labelling of their accounts as “government-funded media”. The main BBC account was given the same label, but later had it changed to “publicly funded”.

Musk has also added some new elements to Twitter’s interface, namely the view counts on posts, and the For You algorithmic feed. The latter has been problematic for many users, throwing up content that they would never have sought out and could find objectionable. Some of that has come from previously banned accounts being reinstated, causing a flurry of activity. But other accounts – such as Donald Trump’s – have remained inactive, despite being reinstated by the company.

The bugs

Remember the Fail Whale in the early days of Twitter? it was the error screen that was generated every time Twitter reached capacity. That has largely disappeared in recent years as Twitter expanded and added new infrastructure.

But in the past few months, there have been an increasing number of bugs and failures on Twitter. By the start of March, it had notched up six failures, including one where all links on the site had broken and images did not post. That was reportedly down to a change to the API that a single site reliability engineer had been tasked with. A bad bit of code took down key parts of the site.

But it isn’t the only error that has managed to get through to the public. Twitter Circles were created to allow people to share tweets with a select group of people rather than the wider Twitter community. But they aren’t that private, as it turns out. Numerous users have reported seeing the supposedly private tweets appearing on the For You section of the app, visible to those outside the intended audience.