Twitter, now owned by Elon Musk, is going through a major upheaval. According to Musk the company is losing 4 million dollars a day. Half of the workforce will depart in a massive layoff, raising concerns that there may not be enough staff left to monitor harmful content.
Twitter is also exploring new venues of raising money. One is making authorized accounts, previously available to celebrities and public officials for free, open to all for a charge. Some are worried that imposters make take advantage of this feature. Twitter, with its urgent need to raise money, may prod a small team to implement it as quickly as possible. I request fellow list members to be on the alert. Someone may set up an account pretending to be Richard M Stallman or some other influential programmer, and be granted verification. The account may not last long but significant damage can be done with no more than a few tweets. Elon Musk paid 44 billion dollars to acquire Twitter. Many observers now feel certain that the unreasonably high price has led to savage cost-cutting measures. What people don't notice is that Musk got much free software as well. More accurately he got access thereto in the form of experienced engineers who know what free tools are available and how best to apply them. Many of them are now leaving Twitter and that means the firm is losing access to free software. Because free software is free (as in "free beer") the loss does not immediately show up in the accounts. Neither does the effect of any inappropriate tweet made by the maverick owner. Being invisible loss of this nature evades the attention of most observers, especially financial experts. It is possible that even Elon Musk fails to understand the extent of the problem, for as we all know, he is one character especially fond of the money that he can count. --- Twitter layoffs: Elon Musk's Twitter cuts jobs across the company CNN Business https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/03/tech/twitter-layoffs/index.html Former Twitter chief Jack Dorsey issues apology amid mass layoffs The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/05/twitter-elon-musk-jack-dorsey-apology Confusion and Frustration Reign as Elon Musk Cuts Half of Twitter's Staff New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/technology/elon-musk-twitter-layoffs.html ... The cuts were so haphazard that at one late-night meeting about the Twitter Blue subscription product, at least one worker was locked out of the company's systems during the call, according to three people with knowledge of the meeting and internal messages viewed by The New York Times. ... By early Friday, the scale of the layoffs by Elon Musk, Twitter's new owner, was becoming clear: Roughly half of the company's work force, or about 3,700 jobs, had been eliminated, four people with knowledge of the matter said. The cuts hit across many divisions, including the engineering and machine learning teams, the trust and safety teams that manage content moderation, and the sales and advertising departments. Rarely have layoffs this deep been made by a single individual at a tech company. ... At the same time, some advertisers, which provide 90 percent of Twitter's revenue, have paused their spending on the platform, citing fears over how the site's content might change under Mr. Musk. That pullback accelerated on Friday as advertisers like Volkswagen Group joined the growing boycott. Civil rights groups have repeatedly warned that loosening Twitter's content rules might lead to a rise in toxic speech. Twitter confirms fee for blue-tick verification after Musk takeover BBC News https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-63530872 Twitter users jump to Mastodon - but what is it? https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-63534240 _______________________________________________ libreplanet-discuss mailing list libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org https://lists.libreplanet.org/mailman/listinfo/libreplanet-discuss