So according to this new report,
Elon Musk fired a top Twitter engineer for telling him some dirty truths.
I suppose things he didn't really wanna hear.
This about his lack of Twitter engagement on his tweets despite the fact he has
all of these millions of followers.
Here's the details from Zoe Schiffer and Casey Newton were involved in this.
For weeks now, Elon Musk has been preoccupied with worries about how many
people are seeing his tweets.
Last week, the Twitter CEO took his Twitter account private for
a day to test whether that might boost the size of his audience.
I must say it again,
the Twitter CEO needed to test Twitter because he doesn't know what's going on
there because he knows everything until he doesn't know anything.
Anyway, he decided to ask some questions because on Tuesday he assembled
several employees to ask them why his engagement numbers were down.
This ridiculous is what Musk said,
according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of that meeting.
I have more than 100 million followers, and
I'm only getting tens of thousands of impressions.
>> Mm-hm.
>> One of the company's two remaining principal engineers offered a possible
explanation for his declining reach.
Just under a year after the Tesla CEO made his surprise offer to buy Twitter for
$44 billion public interest in his antics is waning.
>> Mm-hm. >> I'm not sure if they used those words,
but that's definitely the truth because check out this chart here because at one
point he was peaking, and he was quite happy.
He's like $44 billion well spent, thank you very much.
But then he wasn't anticipating the rest of this, which seemed to be low.
They must be shadow-banning him and that CEO of Twitter needs to, I guess, pay up.
He's the guy, there's more though.
After hearing this, this is what he told his employee.
He says, you're fired.
That's what he told engineers- >> Sounds like someone familiar.
>> Sitting there and that's definitely,
I think- >> Yeah.
>> His approach, he probably sat back and said, yes,
good job Elon- >> Another baby.
>> Good job.
>> All right, this is just straight out of my wheelhouse.
I mean, Casey Newton is one of the better journalists studying social
media corporations and the abuses that some of them have laid out.
Elon Musk for many years has been a union buster and
has been completely against labor.
When he took over Twitter, it was a fix and a fetish for
him because he gets off on popularity and
being some public hero/anti-hero scoundrel, all right?
And Twitter's algorithms tend to boast content that will arouse or
outrage people, which is true across the board.
Most of Facebook and Instagram and TikTok's algorithms do the same, but
I think at a certain point we're all sick and tired of this, all right?
Perhaps, I hope we're sick and tired of the former president as well.
Enough is enough and
if you actually look at what Musk has done since he's taken over Twitter, and
I've been looking at your coverage here on the Young Turks on this.
Immediately fired quite a few people,
which is true across the board with technology companies.
Took out the most important people who would have been working for Twitter, who
should be living wage paid journalists, which would be content moderators.
Those are the people who actually clean up our feeds to ensure that we're not just
constantly pumped with hateful, racist, xenophobic, misogynist, etc.
Transphobic, queer phobic, etc.
Content, so he said we're getting rid of those and here's the other thing,
he said that he would make these algorithms open source.
So at least the geeky wider community could weigh in and
look at what are some of the biases associated with that.
We're not seeing much of that either.
So across the board we know that Twitter has only 440 million global users,
but it has profound effects on journalism because many of us journalists,
and I'm a hybrid scholar journalist in my way we get our stories using Twitter.
So it can, even though it has only less than half a billion users,
it influences journalists and journalism and their selection of stories.
So Musk got off on this, I'm the man,
I'm in charge of what he called the world's public sphere.
But it's essentially being a disaster advertisers are flocking away from
Twitter.
He used his Tesla money to buy Twitter, now that's not going well.
Tesla stock is also tanking.
Maybe we've all had enough and maybe advertisers, user,
laborers, they've all had enough of this and so
you can see what a profound lack of leadership we see in relation to Mr Musk.
>> Maybe it's being more and more clear that the reasons he wanna do this was for
engagement and it's down [LAUGH].
>> [LAUGH] >> Yeah, I mean, he caught the social
media bug as an influencer, I know how it is, I've seen it so many times, all right?
People catch the bug and then when you start seeing your engagement go down all
of a sudden your true colors and the type of person you are comes out, all right?
So he definitely did this for the popularity, and
he was the man of the hour, but it's 15 minutes are up, and I think it goes to
show that at the end of the day nobody really cared about what he had to say.
Everyone was involved in the antics and trying to figure out what was next with
Twitter because a lot of people use Twitter for actually, excuse me,
actual reasonable purposes, all right?
>> Yes.
>> As mentioned earlier for journalism, and to share thoughts and
things like that.
So now that opportunity has pretty much been stripped from the average user unless
you pay for Twitter blue- >> Yeah.
>> People don't have a reason to be over there kicking it the same way.
So sorry, Elon.
>> And. >> Find something else to do.
>> Goes through the same things over and over again.
She's looking to shock and people are, okay,
I've been shocked enough I understand what you're trying to do here.
By the way, before we jump out of here,
Ramesh, you point out how he went on the firing speed from the beginning.
This is the details of one particular employee says what it looks like because
of that because maybe people think he fired all these people, and it's great.
So you guys were crazy about this.
This is what this one employee said,
we haven't seen much in the way of longer term cogent strategy.
Most of our team is dedicated to three main areas, putting out fires mostly
caused by firing the wrong people and trying to recover from that.
Performing impossible tasks and improving efficiency, quote unquote,
without clear guidelines of what the expected end results are.
We mostly moved from dumpster fire to dumpster fire.
>> That's extremely telling actually because there tends to be a focus amongst
many technologists who we know are not just about technology, all right?
Technology mediates almost everything in our lives these days, all right?
Data and algorithms and so on.
There's an obsession with efficiency.
There's certain buzzwords that people don't actually unpack in the tech world
efficiency, innovation, disruption, those are three of them.
So what do you mean by efficiency?
A particular type of efficiency could actually generate mass inefficiencies,
all right?
>> Mm-hm. >> If your efficiency is to rile
people up,
you will then create the inefficiencies of a society that goes crazy, all right?
So this is typical tech-speak, which is a very flattened vision
of a social reality and let alone any understanding of it at all.
>> Spoken like a true professor.