Has Elon Musk killed Twitter?

In 2022, the world’s richest individual paid $44bn to remould the platform in his vision. A year on, even his followers agree he may have missed the mark. Faiz Siddiqui, Rachel Lerman and Jeremy B Merrill report

The company now charges for multiple aspects of using the site (Reuters)

A year ago this month, Elon Musk turned to his favourite social media site with a question. “Is Twitter dying?” he asked.

On the anniversary of his takeover bid, he may have his answer.

Twitter has been dramatically transformed under Musk, and few – even among those in the billionaire’s corner – say the changes have been for the better. In recent weeks, government agencies, news organisations and powerful social media influencers have questioned the usefulness of the platform, with some major players publicly abandoning their accounts or telling users they can’t rely on the site for urgent information.

Advertisers have fled in droves over Musk’s policy changes and erratic behaviour on the platform, causing advertising revenue to drop in recent months by as much as 75 per cent, according to a person familiar with the matter who agreed, on condition of anonymity, to share sensitive internal information.

Rounds of lay-offs have left Twitter operating with a skeleton staff of 1,500 – an 80 per cent reduction – and so riddled with bugs and glitches that the site can go down for hours at a time. Meanwhile, the value of the company has cratered, Musk has admitted, to less than half of the $44bn he paid six months ago.

“I’d say the pain level of Twitter has been extremely high,” Musk said in an interview last week with the BBC, assessing his first half-year in charge. “It’s been really quite a stressful situation.” But he added that advertisers were returning, and that he anticipates a roughly “break even” financial picture, stating: “Overall, I think the trend is very good.”

Even some of his fans see things quite differently. Musk has garnered a reputation as a supposedly brilliant businessman with the Midas touch, but his erratic decision-making at Twitter has taken off some of the sheen.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk provides an update on the development of the Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy rocket at the company’s launch facility in Texas (Washington Post photo by Jonathan Newton)

“I am disappointed that he seems to have made as many mistakes as he’s made with Twitter. I don’t think the product’s gotten materially better,” said one person in Musk’s orbit who initially cheered the takeover, speaking on condition of anonymity to offer a candid assessment of the new owner’s tenure.

“He overpaid. He got a lot of bad press,” the person added. “It’s surprising.”

Neither Musk nor Twitter responded to a request for comment.

Even Musk’s purchase of the site was steeped in drama. It began a little over a year ago, when it was revealed that Musk, then the world’s richest person, had purchased a more than 9 per cent stake in Twitter, making him its largest individual shareholder. Days later, he launched a hostile takeover bid.

Musk wrote that Twitter’s failure to adhere to the principle of free speech – likely a reference to its policy of banning problematic accounts – “fundamentally undermines democracy” given the site’s role in fostering public debate. He accused Twitter’s leaders of tolerating armies of phoney accounts, known as bots, and pledged to “defeat the spam bots or die trying!”. Under his leadership, he said, Twitter would seek to “authenticate all real humans”.

Roughly six months in, Musk has kept some of those promises. He has restored many previously banned accounts, including that of former US president Donald Trump. And his subscription model aims to tackle bot accounts, building on attempts his staff have made to target the geographic locations where much of the fake material is generated. This week, he says, Twitter will switch largely to a paid subscription model for verifying the authenticity of accounts.

But some of these decisions are noticeably shifting the conversation on the site, and having unintended consequences, such as outages.

Former employees, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, previously said that Musk had gutted many of the company’s core functions, like risk assessment on new product launches and deleting some user data in line with federal requirements. Twitter internally is chaotic, they said, with little coherent strategy other than the imperative to respond to Musk’s latest whim.

“The magic is gone and the carnival barker’s in charge,” one of the former employees said, adding that it “feels like it’s gone from the centre of all public conversation to some regrettable networking event where everyone’s got business cards but no one’s got a job”.

Recently, some users have noticed bizarre glitches. Some found their timelines were populated with tweets by users they did not follow, and more recently, some noticed an inability to reply to tweets.

Last week, users of Twitter Circle – a feature that limits content shared on Twitter to a smaller group – found that their content, some of it explicit, was instead being shared across the site. Days later, Twitter users widely reported a new problem: They could no longer reply to tweets in their timelines using a web browser.

Part of the chaos stems from Musk’s decision to shift from a chronological feed to a new “For You” feed that relies on an algorithm to surface content. It fundamentally changes the way the site functions, inundating users with a flood of tweets from people they don’t follow – and content they don’t necessarily want to see. It relies on signals users send when they interact with other content on the site. Even the old chronological “Following” feed is populated with recommendations for tweets from outside users, an analysis found.

Marjorie Taylor Greene speaks about Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and her vision of free speech online during a news conference on Capitol Hill (Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford)

A previous analysis found that Twitter was amplifying hate speech in its “For You” timeline, thanks in part to Musk’s decision to restore thousands of previously suspended accounts.

Under Musk, Twitter expanded its overall emphasis on recommendations – and added a twist. Code released in late March includes a “multiplier” for tweets from users who pay to subscribe to Twitter Blue, attaining the blue check mark that was previously limited to verified users.

Those users’ tweets would be set to a default value of two, apparently pushing them into the feeds of users who don’t follow them at a likelihood twice as high as for those of people who don’t pay. It’s not clear what value, if any, is in use today.

Musk’s changes to the verification model – on top of having driven away some news organisations with some of the other changes he has made – are making the site less reliable as a source of information, some experts and users say.

Last week, US broadcasters NPR and PBS said they would stop tweeting from their main accounts after Twitter labelled them “government-funded media”. Twitter first labelled NPR “state-affiliated”, a label generally reserved for government-run propaganda outlets like Russia’s RT and the Chinese Communist Party’s People’s Daily, before changing the label when NPR pushed back.

“We are not putting our journalism on platforms that have demonstrated an interest in undermining our credibility and the public’s understanding of our editorial independence,” NPR said in a statement.

PBS spokesperson Jason Phelps said the outlet had stopped tweeting when it learned of the “government-funded” label and has “no plans to resume at this time”.

Musk took aim at NPR’s stance in a tweet, pointing out that NPR’s website calls federal funding “essential” to the public radio service.

“What have you got against the truth @NPR?” he wrote.

A different change is threatening Twitter’s usefulness to the US National Weather Service, which has long used automatic tweets to communicate urgent news about extreme weather to the public. Twitter users have had access to systems that allow them to push automated posts by connecting to external sources of information, allowing the Weather Service and meteorologists to send out rapid warnings when tornadoes or floods are about to hit.

As weather conditions change, the agency relies on these automated posts to keep people up to date, sometimes sending dozens a day.

Twitter said last month it would limit automated tweets to 1,500 a month, and charge $100 (£81) per month for those who wanted to send up to 50,000. After the change takes effect, the Weather Service said, its automated tweets about severe weather “may not be posted”. Officials said that Twitter had told them no exceptions would be made in respect of the new limits.

Twitter’s tweaks are already causing smaller issues for weather-watchers: James Spann, chief meteorologist for ABC 33/40 in Birmingham, Alabama, said Twitter integration with Slack is broken, which is a problem for him because he uses the chat tool to communicate with weather-spotters on the ground.

“That’s really aggravating,” he said. “One day, we had a tornado event here and we had no warnings on the Slack channel.”

Twitter enacted another change this month that riled some of its power-users. After the newsletter site Substack unveiled a feature that appeared to resemble a Twitter clone, Twitter started limiting engagement on tweets that included Substack links. Twitter’s apparent hostility towards Substack prompted the journalist Matt Taibbi – who was among those selected by Musk to release details of the “Twitter Files”, a series of internal documents published last year – to announce that he was remaining on Substack and shifting to its Twitter clone.

Twitter is also aggressively trying to monetise, to the frustration of some users. The company recently announced that it would limit access to its application programming interface (API), a software tool that allows outside researchers and developers to collect and analyse data, and that it would charge a fee in most cases.

One researcher said Twitter had told them that enterprise access would now cost an exorbitant price, limiting the ability of researchers to study the spread of online conversations, misinformation and harms.

“As a research institute, I don’t have $42,000 a month to pay them for less data than we get now,” said Caitlin Watkins, executive director of the Observatory on Social Media at Indiana University, which studies media and technology in society and creates tools to analyse social media. The change in policy could force the centre to shut down tools built for journalists and researchers to access data, as well as hurt its efforts to research topics including the spread of misinformation.

Twitter headquarters on 10th Street in San Francisco, California (Getty)

“I don’t think anyone is overselling it or being dramatic,” she said. “Saying that it will fundamentally change what we do doesn’t feel strong enough. This is completely reworking everything that we have done.”

Such aggressive efforts to monetise Twitter are, in part, helping to pay for the site. Musk’s purchase of the platform, financed with a combination of loans and equity commitments – including from his own wealth – has saddled the company with roughly $1bn in yearly interest payments. In addition, 61 of Twitter’s top pre-Musk advertisers cut their advertising by 80 per cent or more in the twelve months prior to March 2023, according to data from Pathmatics, which conducts brand analyses.

The company now charges for multiple aspects of using the site, including $8 monthly for blue check marks. It has trimmed expenses by reducing its payroll, closing offices and auctioning off equipment.

Musk has said that despite Twitter’s prior severe cash-burn problems, the company is trending towards breaking even financially. “Many have predicted Twitter will cease to function,” Musk said. “They were wrong.”

Musk said late last year that he would step down as Twitter CEO. Last week, he said he had done so, promoting his dog, Floki, to the role instead.

Even so, some worry that Musk – who admitted to sleeping on a library couch at Twitter – has once again overextended himself. During the BBC interview, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX referenced plans to pursue generative artificial intelligence, following a news report that Twitter was accumulating powerful computer equipment for the purpose, entering the same field responsible for large language models such as ChatGPT.

Musk incorporated a new AI-focused start-up, X.AI, in Nevada last month, documents filed with the state showed – a development first reported by The Wall Street Journal. The filing authorises 100 million shares and lists Musk as director.

Meanwhile, Twitter is a shadow of its former self, without anything to replace it, according to one of its former employees. “There’s no true alternative,” they said. “Twitter was one of a kind.”

© The Washington Post