Friday open thread: Quo vadis, Twitter?
Twitter’s workforce is likely to be hit with massive cuts in the coming months, no matter who owns the company, interviews and documents obtained by The Washington Post show, a change likely to have major impact on its ability to control harmful content and prevent data security crises.
...
The impact of such layoffs would likely be immediately felt by millions of users, said Edwin Chen, a data scientist formerly in charge of Twitter’s spam and health metrics and now CEO of the content-moderation start-up Surge AI. He said that while he believed Twitter was overstaffed, the cuts Musk proposed were “unimaginable” and would put Twitter’s users at risk of hacks and exposure to offensive material such as child pornography.
Let's be clear: If this were to happen, I and millions of Twitter users would delete our accounts. The service, which is already known as a "hellsite", would swarm with hackers and other bad actors. No one wants to mess with that.
But forget about us proles. Blue check accounts would depart in droves, for the same reasons. Do you think government accounts would remain on the service if their ability to deter hacking were to vanish? Media? Celebrities?
Whether Elon Musk buys Twitter or not—and the deadline for that is October 28, when the stay of the trial will end—the social media site is circling the drain. Its future under either regime is bleak. It may or may not be overstaffed; certainly, its current staffing level doesn't provide the security it needs. But a gutting of its employees will make it nigh unusable for anyone. It will be Gab with 280 million users, many of whom will flee it.
The fact of the matter is this: Twitter and most social media have been a failed experiment. Rather than connecting people from around the world, it has served to divide them and set them at each others' throats. I'm on Counter Social, and I can attest that a social media site can have robust moderation and deliver a "social" experience. The likes of Twitter and Facebook could have done this. They chose not to, because their business model depended on engagement. It didn't matter if that engagement was toxic. Eyeballs on ads drove all decisions. What's happening to Twitter now will happen to Facebook.
As for me? The day these cuts come into play, Twitter will have no utility for me, and millions of others. I don't particularly want to live the Lord of the Flies.