Twitter, Elon Musk announces massive drop in revenue

Elon Musk’s early days at the helm of Twitter are proving to be full of news and information: just this morning we reported a massive wave of layoffs – we are talking about nearly 4,000 employees left at home more or less overnight – and of cancellations of nearly one million accounts by users. In the past few hours, Musk has returned to using “his of him” platform to announce a “massive drop in turnover“, using his words.

The founder of Tesla and SpaceX says the fault lies with the gods activist groups who lobbied advertisers, “although nothing has changed in terms of content moderation and we have done everything we could to please the activists.” The tweet ends with a curious “they are trying to destroy free speech in America” ​​- curious because it is hard to understand how advertisers can have the power or responsibility to protect free speech in America, but so on. ‘is.

Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists.

Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America.

– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 4, 2022

The Verge notes that there is some truth in Musk’s statements: many large groups and brands, including Audi and General Motors, have confirmed that they have stopped advertising campaigns on the platform. But it is difficult to understand what the reason is: the American newspaper notes for example that generally advertisers tend to prefer stable and dispute-free platforms, and as soon as he took the lead Musk began to fire most of the top managers, including the ‘CEO; because of that the head of marketing, Sarah Personette, has resigned. In addition, as we said, in the past few hours another decidedly unpopular decision has come, namely that of mass layoffs.

Clearly, nothing can be given for certain at the moment, but let’s put it this way: this alternative explanation is definitely credible and plausible. For now Musk has presented no evidence to support his accusations, nor did he specify in detail what “everything possible” was done to try to please the activists. Musk is known to have held a 45-minute video meeting with representatives of seven nonprofits to clarify the rules on moderation of hate speech, but other initiatives have not been disclosed.