Alarm is going over how the world’s richest person, Elon Musk, is changing Twitter, after he spent $44 billion to buy the influential social media platform. On Friday, Musk fired nearly half Twitter’s workforce in a mass layoff that gutted teams dedicated to combating election misinformation, just days before Tuesday’s midterm election. In fact, he fired something like 3,700 workers.
Elon Musk met last week with over half a dozen civil rights groups amidst concerns he’ll let misinformation and hate speech go unchecked. Media Matters, Free Press, dozens more groups urged Twitter’s top advertisers to boycott the platform if proper safety standards are not imposed. In response, General Motors, Volkswagen, Pfizer and General Mills have all paused advertising.
And he agreed to each one of those demands on the call — actually, surprisingly, basically said he agreed with everything that we said. We told Mr. Musk that he had to actually say this publicly, if we were going to be able to say anything about this meeting, in a way that really spoke to the fact that he made these agreements. About 1:30 in the morning the next day, he tweeted out, tagging the folks who were in the meeting, including myself, in a tweet, agreeing to these demands.
I would absolutely agree with Rashad that, you know, Twitter was not good before. Twitter was a toxic environment even before Musk. That’s part of what we look at in our “Empty Promises”, trying to really identify how is Twitter, how are other major platforms performing ahead of the midterms. And what we found was that Twitter is in the bottom half of major platforms in protecting users. This is the most basic protections Twitter has already failed to provide users.
At this point they are flailing, and we are one day from the midterms. I don’t understand how someone who is the newcan, in one breath, say that he is committed to election integrity, committed, as Rashad said, all of the things that he promised when we met with Musk, and then turn around and take all of these actions.
twitter is not a news agency twitter is not a voting booth
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