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Regular people have been trying to explain this to the "center-right" for a while now: Twitter's moderation policies weren't primarily dictated by their political views, they were primarily dictated by building an advertiser friendly platform. Which Musk exploded almost immediately by endorsing a far right homophobic conspiracy theory about a violent attack on the family member of an elected politician.

You can say "with the benefit of hindsight" but I would put to you: with the benefit of foresight, lots of people told him exactly what would happen. The problem isn't the management structure, it's that Musk is unfamiliar with pretty basic facts about twitter, such as its engineering architecture, its business model, and its position in the market.

From what I understand, Twitter's moderation is noticeably more left-wing than that of Facebook. And yet Facebook makes a lot of ad dollars. So I do think there's a discretionary element there.

I agree that Musk hasn't been behaving in a way that's advertiser-friendly.

Jack Dorsey is super familiar with Twitter and said Elon was the best solution for it if it was gonna stay a company: https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/25/jack-dorsey-says-elon-musk....

I'm sure we can find someone, somewhere who correctly predicted in advance how things could go down, but I'm skeptical that it was a widespread prediction. Certainly feel free to prove me wrong.

Facebook is a very different business from Twitter in 3 ways - firstly scale, they're more than 5x the size, secondly in engagement - they have enormous amounts of demographic and behaviour data about their users and they track them extensively across the web, and finally business model - Twitter does brand advertising whereas Facebook is much closer to point of sale, an advert on Facebook is likely to directly convert to a sale, whereas an advert on twitter is just mainly brand advertising - Facebook's type of advert is far more valuable. So it's difficult to directly compare them.

But more importantly there's a big difference between how Facebook and Twitter work - Facebook is default closed, people can't interact with you unless you're putting yourself out there - either by friending people or joining a group, so there's a natural barrier against the spread of harassment, brigading and the toxic behaviour becoming public. There is a whole load of toxic neo-nazi stuff on Facebook, but it's out of view, and because ads are highly targetted there's no concern about brand safety. On Twitter it's default open, so if people are going around loudly spreading far right homophobic conspiracy theories about a violent attack on an elected official everyone is going to know about it - that's why Twitter has to be so careful.

There were a lot of people who have been in social media who explained in a lot of detail about how these things work when Elon first got involved. For example, Yishan Wong ran reddit back in 2012, at the time he had an extremely similar free speech maximalist view similar to Musk's current view. He did a very clear explanation of the dynamics of why that approach simply doesn't work - https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1514938507407421440 .

>But more importantly there's a big difference between how Facebook and Twitter work - Facebook is default closed, people can't interact with you unless you're putting yourself out there - either by friending people or joining a group, so there's a natural barrier against the spread of harassment, brigading and the toxic behaviour becoming public. There is a whole load of toxic neo-nazi stuff on Facebook, but it's out of view, and because ads are highly targetted there's no concern about brand safety. On Twitter it's default open, so if people are going around loudly spreading far right homophobic conspiracy theories about a violent attack on an elected official everyone is going to know about it - that's why Twitter has to be so careful.

Interesting point!

I'm not totally convinced though, I'd expect there are a lot of neo-nazis on Facebook who make their posts publicly viewable. "Hey look guys, there's this terrible neo-nazi post!" -> some FB users see an ad for their fav brand above the post.

Public neo nazi accounts are moderated and closed on Facebook. They operate in private ones.

It's also worth remembering, Facebook has about 15,000 paid moderators. Because they print money they can just solve the moderation problem with brute force. It's pretty funny when you think Facebook employs twice as many people just for moderation than Twitter employed in total at its peak, obviously the moderators are cheap, but still funny.

Facebook seems to be literally biased toward right wing and intentionally so.

But, they do contain nazi in their own private bubbles, so the risk of your ad being next to that content is significantly smaller.

Both internal and external review of twitter shows a bias towards the right. It is probably still "more left-wing than that of facebook" but still distinctly rightwing.

Having ISIS & Taliban accounts not a problem for Advertisers. Twitter lost my support when they provided the platform for terrriosts.

The timeline you drew here is wack

He started firing people day 1 and bragging about it online. Of course his remaining employees are going to shit talk him.

The “ultimatum” sure as hell wasn’t in response to this either, I don’t know if you are implying that or not. He pulled this exact same stunt at Tesla just a few months ago. The dude is a raging asshole surrounded by yes men. If you value your health and your family you should not work for this man

I searched for the Tesla ultimatum you refer to. It seems to have been different, specifically saying execs couldn't work remotely: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-01/musk-s-te...

Contrast w/ Twitter ultimatum: https://twitter.com/donie/status/1592859900941852674

I think the Twitter ultimatum is the kind of thing you send if you suspect most employees don't support your leadership / are not pulling their weight. Similar to the Zappos philosophy of offering a generous severance to everyone who quits, in order to have an office full of enthusiastic employees.

What are you talking about? You are completely fabricating a narrative here.

> “Everyone at Tesla is required to spend a minimum of 40 hours in the office per week,”

Tesla is RTO. Quit defending this billionaires psychopathic behavior. This is not a healthy way to run a company

I guess I over-indexed on the "Tesla Execs" in the headline.

I don't think requiring 40 hours in office makes you "psychopathic". People can quit if they don't like it shrug

They were a remote-first org dude. Many had no childcare set up, long commutes, or were on H1Bs as well. This isn’t a “if they don’t like it, quit.” Type of situation. It’s being manipulated into padding the ego of a billionaire with no gain.

I hope you don’t manage a team or have any responsibility for the well-being of others. I’m quite shocked at how little sympathy you have for strangers

My statement referred to Tesla. I agree that it sucks for Twitter employees who depended on remote work arrangements.

However, 7500 people is way too much staff in my opinion. As I mentioned, I worked at one of the world's biggest websites and it had about 1% of that staff.

Realistically, if an unprofitable company is getting acquired, the acquirer is most likely going to cut a lot of positions. One way to do this is to be really demanding and let people self-select out of the company. 3 months severance is a decent period of time to find a new job.

Remember many/most of these people are in the global upper class https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/07/21/are-you-in-... In the grand scheme of things, they aren't suffering that much

You're missing a significant bullet point which is that in-between Musk arriving and Twitter employees resigning, Musk fired 50% of the workforce. That seems like a much more significant factor in whether systems can be maintained.

Good point. And that also probably creates fear/resentment among the remaining employees.

I guess Elon is a weird combination of being very good at the "visionary" aspects of leadership (inspiring people with "Occupy Mars") and being very bad at the "managing" aspects (creating psychological safety & high morale for employees).

This leadership style doesn't work unless your employees believe in your vision.

He's done little to nothing since the takeover of Twitter to articulate a meaningful or inspiring vision. At best his messaging has been erratic.

If you need half of 7500 people to maintain a system like Twitter, something is fundamentally wrong with the tech stack and the tech people that work there.

Agreed. I used to work at a top 200 website (also social media) and we had about 30 engineers and another 30 non-engineer staff.

I think cutting workforce was the correct move for an acquirer, but he probably should've moved just a bit slower (e.g. using a more sophisticated metric for employee productivity than "# lines committed"). And of course try to make cuts in a way that doesn't harm the morale of those who aren't cut.

Technically your car will drive without a brake pedal, a roof and tires too

> Twitter employees amuse themselves by making billionaire's life difficult

Where did you get that from? He immediately started firing people, so when should they have done that?

https://twitter.com/rlycalm/status/1592636069224542208

Granted, I don't know this person is actually an engineer as opposed to a troll. And she doesn't claim that she or other employees actively tried to create trouble.

So there was an aspect of me reading subtext into her tweet + Elon's ultimatum. Maybe incorrectly.

That is a joke post. That person was never a Twitter employee. But even if they counterfactually were, big deal if the grunts at the organization you take over have a nickname for you.

Here's my own understanding:

* Musk didn't really want to buy Twitter. He screwed up and got locked into a contract he couldn't figure out a way out of.

* Having figured that he vastly overpaid, he panicked and tried to cut down the fat. Problem is that he hasn't spent enough time there to figure out where's the fat.

* Musk fundamentally doesn't understand what he has bought. He doesn't understand that Twitter's business relies on pleasing advertisers, who don't give a crap about free speech ideals and are very risk averse.

* Musk doesn't understand that what he bought is far more about people skills than anything else. Managing an online community is an exercise in cat herding. At Twitter's scale you also have to content with thorny legal issues. None of that is fun. Many forces push things into a familiar direction, and "free speech" is a very tough direction to pick.

* Musk doesn't understand even the basics of the platform he bought, like why the blue checkmarks provided any value. He proceeded to immediately throw a huge wrench into that system, to nearly no economic benefit.

* Musk is trying to have his cake and eat it too. On one hand he wants unrestricted free speech, on the other hand he wants to make money from advertisers that don't care for free speech. You can pick one or the other.

* Musk seems not to understand that Twitter isn't SpaceX. There's few places where you can work on a rocket, but a lot of places where you can maintain a backend. You can sell the dream of colonizing Mars to rocket engineers, but Twitter employees can go most anywhere else and do mostly the same thing.

* Musk seems not to understand that since his employees have plentiful options, he can't strong arm them. They can leave. They're generally well paid, and his takeover provides plentiful options for them to organize, help each other and start lawsuits if he breaks any laws.

> He doesn't understand that Twitter's business relies on pleasing advertisers, who don't give a crap about free speech ideals and are very risk averse.

Musk does not care about free speech either.

That's a good point, true free speech fanatics are extremely rare. Most everyone in reality thinks that their group is being silenced, and wouldn't mind silencing their ideological opposition.

Oh comeon. Musk acted like a douch to his employees. Actively trying to make their life crap and shitpoating on how bad they are. This had nothing to do with politics. More like ppl with other options taking them to avoid being treated like crap.

A Much simpler explanation

Out of curiosity, where do you tend to learn about this stuff? What sites/news sources do you use?

Mostly twitter actually. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/with_replies and tweets it recommends to me. I don't actually have an account.

For what it’s worth, your post is wildly inaccurate. To me it reads like the understanding of someone who consumes a lot far-right stuff and cannot discern between online talk show narrative and factual real world events. You might consider enriching your media diet.

Well, I said I appreciated corrections :-)

I think this comment from you is a bit too high-level to be useful though, maybe it'd be more helpful to identify the bullet point which is most inaccurate and explain why, with citations.

I mostly vote for Democrats btw.

I'm not the person you replied to but when I read your comment at the top-level it suggested that "far left" and "liberal" people were a problem at Twitter and that they needed to be somehow removed from the org to fix it. This is a fairly common trope among the alt-right and far-right - that the damn snowflake liberals want to take away your freedom of speech (and take your guns, and turn your kids trans, etc etc), and to be honest I raised an eyebrow. Though it could possibly be that you meant it to be read as "ok assuming Musk thinks liberals/left-leaning employees are the problem, here's how he could have booted them in a less chaotic way ..."

Well Elon has a lot of haters, especially among liberal people, so it seems pretty reasonable to deduce that many Twitter employees were Elon haters? And yeah, a company full of employees who hate the CEO isn't gonna function great. So in that sense, it's a problem to solve independent of the damn snowflake liberals angle.

Is there a specific "enriching my media diet" thing I'm missing here? Like I feel like that paragraph ^ is just common sense.

I don't think that is a problem you need to solve at all. Who cares if your employees don't like you? There are thousands of CEOs worldwide and likely most of their employees resent, distrust, dislike or even hate them - but they need to work with each other and usually manage (if begrudgingly) to do so.

I didn't say you should enrich your media diet - I don't really care what you watch or read.

Sure, maybe a better way to put it would be: at high-functioning companies, workers believe in the CEO. So if you want to create a high-functioning company, and lots of workers are never gonna believe in the CEO because they think he's a "psychopath" (term used elsewhere in this thread for Elon because he wants employees to work 40 hours in the office!), then it makes sense to encourage those workers to leave on some kind of timetable, same way Zappos offers a nice severance so they're left with only the most enthusiastic employees

He fired ~3700 after a couple of days - that’s not encouraging anyone to leave on some kind of timetable, that’s a mass layoff. It certainly doesn’t make him a psychopath, but it does make him a boss that I would not want to work for - so I completely understand the exodus that this (and a few of the other questionable moves) appears to have started

I don't know, it just feels that every time someone uses "liberuls" and "far left" they are repeating the mantra of the alt-right. It was kinda uncalled for given that these terms have wildly different meanings depending on who's saying them, usually the alt-right co-opted them to be "anything that disagree with us".

It's just exhausting, you could have brought up the same issue without having to resort to divisive discourse :)

And every place I've worked at there were people who hated the CEO, it's just natural, it's a position of power and people don't have to like the CEO to work for a company, even less if it's a large one.

Can't you tell your source is absolutely 100% biased ?

I can't tell if you're satire or for real

That's not the only thing I read.

It's a primary source at least :-)

I also didn't claim to be an unbiased source of information, and in fact actively welcomed corrections...

That was my correction =)

> * Twitter employees amuse themselves by making billionaire's life difficult

Elon got them to print out their code and pissed off the advertisers that where paying them. I don't think it was the employees that made life difficult.

1.) Twitter was not biased for liberals. That part is just not true, no matter what grievance machine says.

2.) Musk intentions were not free speech by any meaningful sense. He does not have track record of valuing it. He values only speech of those he agrees it and is super eager to punish whoever disagree with him. The first departments that had to go were the ones where actual free speech issues are dealt with.

Like, human rights team. Free speech is more then just saying n-word or ability to harass your opponents. It is also not giving your details to law enforcement and policies related to nonwestern countries.

3.) Twitter employees making it difficult for him is just not true. The worst that happened was few people disagreeing with him about technical matters. The free speech advocate was unable to process even technical disagreement.

4.) The idea that it ia far left employees leaving or that there was even that many of them is bonkers. Conservative people think about their employment conditions too. They dont necessary like being humiliated, they are not all doormats and natural born yes men.

> modern liberals against freedom of speech

Can you please give me specific examples of speech that modern liberals are against?

An obvious bone of contention would be whether Trump should get to have an account or not. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33652055

Companies can choose to whom and what they choose to provide a platform, can they not?

For example, Elon Musk has owned Twitter for enough time to have re-instated @realdonaldtrump, yet he has not. Why is that?

The core of my argument is when Elon tweets about how he's in favor of freedom of speech, it makes many liberals squirm. The argument doesn't depend on these sort of details related to whether "freedom of speech" is a purely legal concept, vs one that also makes sense in the context of a social media platform.

Since in reality, not even 4chan allows absolute free speech I see this whole thing as either disingenuous or naive.

> The argument doesn't depend on these sort of details

I would argue that without details arguments are just hand wavy.

Separately,

> ... freedom of speech, it makes many liberals squirm.

I think this meme can be quickly disproved by looking at political subreddits. All right wing subs of which I'm aware have rules which filter out speech which does not toe the party line.

I find the reality of the freedom with which I am allowed to discuss my ideas in righty subs to be extremely hypocritical when they are supposedly all about "free speech."

Covid - if you question the efficacy of masks, vaccines, lockdowns etc then you should immediately be deplatformed.

And you being downvoted proves the point.

It's the same in Europe with the refugee policy, if you dare question that maybe it isn't best for Europe to blindly accept tens of millions of refugees from American wars whilst our economy is in complete freefall, you are branded as racist and cancelled.

His biggest mistake was saying that he would allow Trump back. In the minds of many left-leaning people that makes him a sympathizer in a coup attempt, and those left-leaning people succeeded in creating an extreme amount of pressure against Twitter’s customers (the advertisers) to starve the company.

Musk clearly thinks of himself as creating a platform for free speech, but when it comes to coups there is really no such thing as a middle ground or neutrality.

Can you provide a source for Musk saying that he would allow Trump back? Last I heard, he formed an advisory board, and said account reinstatements were pending discussions of advisory board.

In any case, I think you're correct that this is an important subthread.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/05/elon-musk-would-...

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1524881263470993435

Thanks!