SAN FRANCISCO — A year ago, billionaire and new owner Elon Musk walked into Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters with a white sink and a smile, fired its CEO and other more sensible executives, and began transforming the social media platform into what’s now known as X. .
X is similar to Twitter, but the more time you spend on it, the clearer it becomes that it’s just an approximation. Musk has dismantled key features of what made Twitter Twitter: its logo and bluebird song, its verification system, its acceptance. as is the case with a protection advisory group. Not to mention content moderation and the fight against hate speech.
It has also laid off, laid off or lost most of its workforce: engineers who run the site, moderators who keep it from being overrun with hate, executives charged with crafting regulations and enforcing them.
The result, longtime Twitter watchers say, has been the end of the platform’s role as an imperfect but useful position for figuring out what’s going on in the world. What will X do, and will Musk be able to achieve his ambition to achieve it?A “versatile app” that everyone uses is still as confusing as it was a year ago.
“Musk hasn’t managed to make any significant improvements to the platform and is no closer to his vision of a ‘one-size-fits-all’ app than he was a year ago,” said Jasmine Enberg, an analyst at Insider Intelligence. And now it has lost its main price proposition in the world of social media: being a central hub of information.
As one of the platform’s most popular and prolific users even before he bought the company, Musk had an exclusive Twitter experience that’s markedly different from the way normal users enjoy it. But many of the changes you make to X are based on your own impressions of the site. In fact, he even surveyed his millions of fans to get recommendations on how to take care of him (they said he had quit).
“Musk’s solution to the platform as a tech company that could simply remake and his vision rather than a social network driven by other people and advertising dollars was the main cause of Twitter’s demise,” Enberg said.
The blue checkmarks that once meant that the user or establishment behind an account was who they claimed to be (a celebrity, an athlete, a journalist for a global or local publication, a non-profit agency) now only imply that someone is paying $8 a month. for a subscription service. This enhances your posts over unvetted users. It’s those paid accounts that spread incorrect information on the platform, amplified through its algorithms.
On Thursday, for example, a new report from the left-leaning nonprofit Media Matters found that many X-rated accounts with tens of thousands of fans claimed that the mass shooting in Maine was a “false flag,” planned through the government. It also found that such accounts spread data and propaganda about the war between Israel and Hamas, to the point that the European Commission sent a formal, legally binding request for data to X about its handling of hate speech, data, and violent war-like terrorist content.
Ian Bremmer, a prominent foreign policy expert, posted on . scientist. “
It’s not just the identity of the platform that is fragile. Twitter was already in monetary trouble when Musk bought it for $44 billion in a deal on October 27, 2022, and the scenario looks more precarious now. Musk has privatized the company, so his books are no longer public; However, in July, Tesla’s CEO said the company had lost approximately some of its advertising revenue and still faced significant debt.
“We still have a negative cash flow,” he said on July 14, due to “an approximately 50% drop in advertising profits and heavy debt. “
“You have to have a positive cash flow before you can afford anything else,” he said.
In May, Musk hired Linda Yaccarino, a former NBC executive with close ties to the advertising industry, in an effort to attract big brands, but the effort has been slow to bear fruit. Although some advertisers have reverted to X, they aren’t spending as much as in the past, despite a rebound in the online advertising market that drove recent quarterly earnings of Facebook’s parent company, Meta, and Google’s parent company, Alphabet.
Insider Intelligence estimates that X will generate $1. 89 billion in ad revenue this year, down 54% from 2022. The last time its advertising revenue reached this point was in 2015, when it earned $1. 99 billion. In 2022, it stood at $4. 12 billion.
External studies also show that other people use X less.
According to research firm Similarinternet, global Internet traffic to Twitter. com declined 14% year-over-year, and traffic to the ads. twitter. com portal for advertisers declined 16. 5%. Mobile functionality did not improve, down 17. 8% year-over-year. year based on combined monthly active users for Apple’s iOS and Android.
“Although Twitter’s cultural relevance was already starting to wane,” before Musk took over, “it’s as if the platform no longer exists. And it’s a death through a thousand cuts,” Enberg said.
“It is desirable that almost all injuries are self-inflicted. Normally, when a social platform starts to lose its relevance, there are at least some external points at play, but that’s not the case here.