{"id":255912,"date":"2023-03-07T20:32:49","date_gmt":"2023-03-08T01:32:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=254675"},"modified":"2023-03-07T20:32:49","modified_gmt":"2023-03-08T01:32:49","slug":"glitches-trolls-and-declining-revenue-take-center-stage-in-the-twitter-soap-opera-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2023\/03\/07\/glitches-trolls-and-declining-revenue-take-center-stage-in-the-twitter-soap-opera-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Glitches, trolls, and declining revenue take center stage in the Twitter soap opera"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Social media is known for producing drama. In Twitter’s case, that\u2019s been true as much behind the scenes as on the platform of late. On Monday, the service was hit by the latest in<\/a> a series of glitches; this one made it impossible for users to post images, and also triggered a popup error about the company’s application programming interface, or API, whenever someone clicked on a link. Casey Newton and Zo\u00eb Schiffer later reported<\/a>, in the Platformer<\/em> newsletter, that the glitch was the result of a lone engineer making a mistake while trying to restrict free access to Twitter’s API\u2014a decision that the company recently announced<\/a>, sparking frustration among researchers and journalists who depend on access to the API for their work. Then, on Tuesday, Elon Musk, who acquired Twitter last year for forty-four billion dollars, got into a public spat with Haraldur Thorleifsson, an employee who said he wasn\u2019t sure if he\u2019d just been laid off, with Musk accusing Thorleifsson of doing no work and pretending to have a disability<\/a>.  Thorleifsson has multiple dystrophy and is in a wheelchair, and in the past has been named Iceland’s Person of the Year. (Musk later apologized to Thorleifsson, who, Musk said, is now \u201cconsidering remaining at Twitter.\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also on Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal<\/em> reported that the Federal Trade Commission has demanded that Twitter turn over<\/a> any internal communications related to Musk, as well as detailed information about staff layoffs; according to documents seen by Ryan Tracy, a Journal<\/em> reporter, the FTC cited \u201cconcerns that staff reductions could compromise the company\u2019s ability to protect users.\u201d In letters sent to Twitter and its lawyers since Musk\u2019s acquisition of the company, the FTC also asked the company to identify all journalists who have been granted access to company records. This appears to be a reference to the “Twitter Files,” reports from a number of journalists, including Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, that were based on internal documents that Musk\u2019s Twitter provided to them, and alleged censorship and other improprieties by Twitter\u2019s former management. According to the Journal<\/em><\/a>, the FTC is also seeking to depose Musk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Musk responded to Monday’s technical glitches by saying<\/a> that \u201ca small API change had massive ramifications. The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason. Will ultimately need a complete rewrite.\u201d After the recent housecleaning in which thousands of employees were laid off, Musk demanded that those left at the company commit to his “extremely hardcore” vision, which would see them work for \u201clong hours at high intensity,\u201d or be forced out. Between October, when Musk took control of Twitter, and late January, about eighty percent of full-time workers left the company, Engadget<\/em> reported, leaving it severely understaffed in some areas. A former employee told the Washington Post<\/em><\/a> that at least six critical systems at Twitter\u2014\u201clike \u2018serving tweets\u2019 levels of critical,\u201d the former staffer said\u2014\u201cno longer have any engineers\u201d associated with them. Twitter now has about two thousand employees<\/a>, down from seven thousand five hundred when Musk took over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

According to NetBlocks, a group that tracks internet outages, Twitter went down at least four times in February alone<\/a>; in the whole of last year, it experienced only nine outages. Glitches that have stopped users from posting tweets or slowed down their timeline have become much more noticeable than in the past, users and researchers have said. \u201cIt used to be that you\u2019d see smaller things fail, but now Twitter is going down completely for certain regions of the world,\u201d Saagar Jha, a former engineer at the company, told the Times<\/em>. \u201cWhen serious things break, the people who knew the systems aren\u2019t there.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The glitches at Twitter have had more serious ramifications than merely being annoying (though they have also been that). In February, the Times<\/em> reported that more than thirty<\/a> prominent Chinese dissidents and activists had seen tweets and even their entire accounts disappear, according to interviews with nine of them and other evidence, including screenshots. \u201cThe activists\u2019 accounts did not appear after a search of their Twitter names, the screenshots showed, though impostor accounts turned up,\u201d the Times<\/em> reported. \u201cThree of the dissidents said their accounts had also been suspended with no warning and reinstated only after appeals.\u201d The problems were reportedly a result of mistakes in the company\u2019s automated systems, which are supposed to filter out spam and state-backed disinformation campaigns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This week, Marianna Spring, the BBC’s disinformation and social media correspondent, reported, based on interviews with Twitter insiders as well as academic data and user testimony, that the company<\/a> is no longer able to protect users not only from trolling and state-backed disinformation but also from child sexual exploitation, following the layoffs and other changes since Musk\u2019s acquisition. Twitter\u2019s former head of content design, Lisa Jennings Young, told the BBC that everyone on her team was fired, and that she resigned. Twitter’s own research has suggested that safety measures implemented by Jennings Young and her team likely reduced trolling by as much as sixty percent, according to Spring. An engineer who is currently still working at Twitter said \u201cnobody’s taking care\u201d of this type of work now, and compared the service to a building that seems fine from the outside but inside is \u201con fire\u201d (though it looks pretty on fire from the outside, too). Spring reported<\/a> that \u201ctargeted harassment campaigns aimed at curbing freedom of expression, and foreign influence operations\u201d are now going undetected, and that, since Musk took over, there has been a sixty-nine-percent increase in new accounts that follow misogynistic and abusive profiles. Musk did not speak with the BBC but did dismiss its reporting in a snarky tweet<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last week, the Journal<\/em> reported that Twitter’s revenue and adjusted earnings fell by forty percent in December<\/a>. The report came after several advertisers cut their spending on the service following Musk’s acquisition, which led ad revenue on the platform to drop by more than seventy percent in December. Amazon said at one point that it wouldn’t pay for ads that ran on Twitter, because the company had not paid the bill for its use of Amazon’s cloud services, The Information<\/em> reported<\/a>. In January, Twitter said that it planned to resume allowing political advertising, but Politico<\/em> reported this week that<\/a>, almost two months later, Twitter still doesn’t have any of that type of advertising lined up, either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Tuesday, Musk told an investment conference that he had had to take drastic measures to improve the company\u2019s finances, claiming that without the cuts, it would have gone bankrupt<\/a> by now. Despite these financial difficulties, however, Twitter managed, at the end of January, to make the first interest payment on a loan that helped finance Musk\u2019s purchase of the company, according to Reuters<\/a>, which reported that Twitter recently paid about three-hundred-million dollars to a group of banks to service the more than thirteen billion dollars in financing that went toward the acquisition of the company. Reuters also reported that, last year, Musk initially planned to sell Twitter’s outstanding debt to investors, only to shelve the idea because investors weren\u2019t convinced of the company\u2019s future viability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whether he\u2019s ridiculing employees with disabilities or justifying his capricious layoffs, Musk\u2019s behavior seems increasingly erratic. It would be easy to dismiss it as part of a soap opera that long ago grew kind of tedious. But he remains the CEO of a multibillion-dollar company that continues to play a central role in the information ecosystem. Would-be alternatives such as Mastodon<\/a>, an open-source network, and Bluesky<\/a>, which was founded by the former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, have yet to achieve the momentum to dethrone Twitter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many of us, then, are still on the platform, where reminders of the Musk soap opera are\u2014by design\u2014becoming harder to avoid. Schiffer and Newton reported recently that Musk declared an internal state of emergency after a tweet he posted about the Super Bowl<\/a> got less engagement than a tweet of President Biden\u2019s. On a previous occasion, when an engineer dared to suggest that Musk’s lower reach was because his tweets<\/a> aren\u2019t all that interesting, Musk fired him. After the Super Bowl finished, Musk flew his private jet back to the Bay Area to demand answers about his low-performing tweet, Newton wrote. After being threatened with further firings, according to Newton, Twitter engineers built a system specifically to promote their boss\u2019s tweets. The next day, \u201cTwitter users opened the app to find that Musk\u2019s posts overwhelmed their ranked timeline.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note<\/strong>: This was originally published as<\/a> the daily newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital write<\/em>r<\/p>\n

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