Annalisa Castrogiovanni ‘23
On October 27, 2022, Elon Musk completed his purchase on the popular social media platform Twitter. However, this purchase has Twitter users in a frenzy as they believe Musk is ruining the platform.
This accusation can be justified based on the reasoning that he wants users to pay for verified accounts. The first celebrity that was willing to speak up about this was Stephen King.
“$20 a month to keep my blue check? F*** that, they should pay me. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron.”
Musk then replied with:“We need to pay the bills somehow! Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. How about $8?”
It seems as if Musk made the purchase of Twitter to increase profits. However, since Twitter’s only source of income is from advertising, he wants to resort to other methods, such as monthly subscriptions. But a $20 subscription is clearly extortion.
Since Musk has lowered the subscription to $8 in recent times, many people have been buying blue checkmarks for malicious purposes. If you have $8 in your bank account all you have to do is subscribe to Twitter Blue and your account will be verified, which led to ordinary people impersonating public figures and companies.
For example an account impersonation of the McDonalds franchise tweeted: “Proud to announce that all McDonald's locations will now be serving beyond meat! Our meat is far beyond its expiration date!”
This can be harmful to those who are not looking closely at the Twitter handle of these accounts and it can lead to the spread of false information. Not everyone can process this information due to everyone having different levels of cognitive bias.
However, misinformation is not the only issue at hand – large amounts of workers are getting laid off by Musk. As if that’s not bad enough, they had to receive this message through an email.
“Given the nature of our distributed workforce and our desire to inform impacted individuals as quickly as possible, communications for this process will take place via email. By 9AM PST on Friday Nov. 4th, everyone will receive an individual email with the subject line: Your Role at Twitter. Please check your email, including your spam folder. If your employment is not impacted, you will receive a notification via your Twitter email. If your employment is impacted, you will receive a notification with next steps via your personal email. If you do not receive an email from twitter-hr@ by 5PM PST on Friday Nov. 4th, please email peoplequestions@twitter.com.”
This put the jobs of people at Twitter in jeopardy as they had to look out for an email that determines their future with the company. People were also given an option to opt out of working for the company with work becoming more extensive.
Musk said: “Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore. This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade… If you are sure that you want to be part of the new Twitter, please click yes on the link below: forms.gle. Anyone who has not done so by 5pm ET tomorrow (Thursday) will receive three months of severance.”
When news hit the users of Twitter, they shared their opinion on the platform and its “early death.” On November 17, 2022, users got the hashtag “#RIPTwitter” to trend. They reminisced on all their favorite Twitter memories and joked about how they feel the platform is finally coming to an end.
This leaves the question up to debate. Is Elon Musk going to cause a premature end to Twitter?
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