Twitter's Next Available Steps

 Mass Layoff of Twitter Employees

  Since the acquisition of the company on October 27th, Elon Musk has made plenty of moves to try to better his new company, however many of these actions have been scrutinized heavily by Twitter users and the overall public. The unrest and unsteadiness of the company can be considered to be a cause for the current drama due to the release of the algorithm, and looking deeper into the chaos that was caused by the layoffs within the company might be able to shed a little bit of light on the issue. 



  Upon Musk's takeover, he promptly fired approximately half of his workforce which inevitably led to an incredible amount of worry from the tech industry, Twitter users, and Twitter employees. This unannounced and sudden layoff wave led to a lot of breached contracts from Twitter's end, resulting in severance packages getting paid out to employees, and enormous amounts of money being paid out to the executives who were also fired in a breach of their contract. The payouts from these firings led Musk to realize that Twitter was in fact in a very tough financial spot, which he aimed to solve through the monetization of his platform's verification system. 

  Twitter's subscription-based verification was faced with an immense amount of push-back, however, ended up being cemented in the app without too much issue. However much of the after-effects of the layoffs are not linked to Twitter itself, and are more focused on both the ethical issue that laying off so many employees at once has and the butterfly effect this would proceed to have on the tech industry as a whole. Approximately 3,700 employees left the company by either firing or quitting after being offered an ultimatum. This immense amount of talented workforce with plenty of grade-A work experience now flooded into the tech market taking up jobs all over the place, causing a wave of further layoffs from big name companies such as Meta and Amazon.

  On top of this displacement of the workforce, these ex-employees were also extremely dissatisfied with Elon Musk's actions, leading to increasing acts of leaking company information. A recent example of such behavior comes from the source code for Twitter being leaked about a week ago, suspected from an employee that was fired in those waves "Twitter has been investigating the leak, and the executives looking into the issue believe that the individual who shared parts of the source code is a former employee who left the company last year". Yet another issue that was not commented on by either Twitter or Elon.



  Elon Musk's past acts in managing the Twitter platform have led to the chaos that ensues today and can tell us a lot about how unethical firing practices can generate animosity among ex-employees and can lead to increased risk for the company. It also sets a poor example for current employees and the risks that they entail when working for Twitter.


Sources:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk

https://aakashgupta.substack.com/p/the-real-twitter-files-the-algorithm

https://news.yahoo.com/analysis-twitter-algorithm-code-reveals-072800540.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_Twitter_by_Elon_Musk

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/27/technology/elon-musk-twitter-deal-complete.html

https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/31/23664849/twitter-releases-algorithm-musk-open-source

https://africa.businessinsider.com/news/twitter-executives-reportedly-think-an-ex-employee-leaked-the-companys-source-code/cx15zjq

Comments

  1. Graham CullenApril 5, 2023 at 7:32 AM

    I had no idea that Elon Musk laid off that many employees when taking over Twitter. I for won would be totally pissed off if this happened to me. I am curious to find out what Musk's reasoning was behind all the lay off's and to see how or if it really benefitted the company at all.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Stephanie HeiermannApril 5, 2023 at 9:44 AM

    It is not uncommon for a new executive or CEO to come into a company and make changes, including laying off or firing the old managers. There is always shake up when there is a changing of the guard. However, it seems as though Musk took this way too far. I'm not sure if he was trying to throw around his strength or scare employees or what his thinking was, but it is unfortunate that so many talented people were given ultimatums and lost their jobs. Seems like an overreaction on Musks part.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Malik JaffApril 6, 2023 at 5:06 AM

    I am very shocked to hear about the extreme number of lay off Musk announced after taking over. I’m very curious what prompted him to make such a big move and what his incentive in doing so was. Did he consider the butterfly effect it would have on other employees at other companies that would also be affected by such a large number of tech people now looking for jobs. Was it perhaps related to COVID. If that was the case, then it was a general issue many employees were facing from many big name companies as well. If that wasn’t the case then I would assume it was not necessarily money related from the company’s end. They would have had to place that workload on to either the employees there which would cause more stress thus most likely lessen the quality of the company overall. The alternative would be to hire more people down the line which ultimately would just end up being counterproductive.

    I was actually aware of the censoring that was happening by many social media platforms including Twitter. I recall during the rise of the movement against police brutality in 2020, many of the posts by family and friends including my own were being taken down or just blocked from the general media feed. Not only did it happen then, but it happens a lot to any of the posts exposing the cruelty Israelis are committing against Palestinians. I’ve had people reach out to people I know letting them know their posts have been blocked from being viewed. The very big issue with this is that awareness is being blocked about the severity of these kinds of situations. What this causes is for people to be oblivious to the cruelty and genocide happening around the world and any form of change on any scale starts with awareness.

    ReplyDelete
  4. amour narcisse thompsonApril 6, 2023 at 11:35 AM

    I agree could you imagine the number of people that used twitter as a source of income to pay their bills that in it self was also unethical I believe. Additionally the fact that he could just fire individuals without communicating its effect shows the lack of transparency as well

    ReplyDelete

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