Elon Musk has owned the company formerly known as Twitter for an entire year. It’s been a disaster.
Before Musk, Twitter had its problems. It took forever to release new features and we had to work really hard to stop people from tweeting bad things. But for most of 2022, it was generally functional. Even as the company grappled with the chaos of Musk’s approach to the acquisition, Twitter forged ahead with long-awaited updates like the edit button for Twitter Blue subscribers, new features for its Spaces audio rooms, and smaller improvements like new designs. for icons. The company was working, although it was moving slowly.
In retrospect, the old Twitter was quaint
In retrospect, those Twitter updates were quaint. On October 27, 2022, a day after entering Twitter headquarters in San Francisco with a kitchen sink to post a joke tweet, Musk officially took over the company. He immediately fired key members of Twitter’s senior management and then laid off about 5,000 people (about two-thirds of the company) over the next few weeks. The result was a relatively small team dedicated to crafting Musk’s vision, even if it meant living and sleeping at work.
In a year that was supposed to bring aggressive changes to deal with bots and spoofing of the initial seeds of an “app for everything,” the platform has been plagued by poor decisions made by Musk himself, culminating in a baffling change of mark to the letter. X. It now faces more competition than ever as it contemplates a shortened list of advertising partners who have left the platform over concerns about its instability under Musk.
Much of the damage to Twitter came from one of Musk’s early decisions: Twitter’s first failed attempt to offer paid, verified checkmarks for $7.99 a month (a price Twitter later reached). Stephen King resisted at the rumored $20 monthly fee) and the subsequent removal of legitimate verification credentials from celebrities, journalists, and influencers. The change was obviously flawed from the start, allowing users to impersonate others and giving more visibility to potentially problematic voices who were willing to pay. The result discouraged high-profile creators, celebrities, and brands from using the site (the type of accounts people come to Twitter for in the first place).
Right after the launch, there was a fake Nintendo account with Mario waving his finger and a fake Eli Lilly account saying insulin is now free, which shook the real Eli Lilly stock price as a result. Now, after a relaunch to address the phishing issue, the replies are often filled with boosted posts from crypto influencers and people desperate to participate so they can make money from Twitter’s ad revenue share. Unsurprisingly, it has become difficult to know who actually has influence on the platform and who is simply paying for it.
It wasn’t just the users who fled. Advertisers were also frightened by the disarray on the platform and withdrew or completely suspended their spending. This raised a bigger problem: Twitter makes the vast majority of its money from advertising, and advertisers don’t love the new Twitter. Shortly after Musk took over, three advertising giants told their clients to stop spending on the platform.
Musk has given advertisers good reason to worry about the safety and stability of the platform’s brand. Remember when Twitter banned the account that tracked Musk’s flights, reinstated it, and then banned it again? Or when Twitter banned all links to Instagram, Mastodon, and other competitors and then revoked that ban? Or when Musk ordered changes that caused his tweets to briefly take over the platform? Or when Twitter throttled Substack after it introduced its Twitter-like Notes product? Or when Musk threatened to sue the Anti-Defamation League? Or how the platform appeared to limit links to some competitors and news sites in August and then was caught doing so again in September? Or when Musk threatened to show up at Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s house for his proposed fight? Or when he appeared to trick Zuckerberg on a livestream?
In recent months, the platform’s new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, has been on tour to make it seem like things are not so bad in the world of advertising. On Thursday, he wrote that “since mid-May, all major agencies have reversed their pause guidance against advertising on X,” and last month shared that “90 percent of the top 100 advertisers have returned to the platform.” . She said “big brands” like AT&T, Nissan and Visa were coming back.
But returning does not mean spending at the levels as before. The media is important to the United States reported that Visa had spent just $10 on Twitter in the weeks before Yaccarino’s comments, down from $77,500 in the weeks before Musk bought the company. That explains why the platform’s advertising revenue in the United States was “still down” 60 percent in September, according to Musk himself. Dear technology/us-ad-revenue-musks-x-declined-each-month-since-takeover-data-2023-10-04/”>Given to Reuters indicate that advertising revenue on the platform has decreased year over year every month since Musk has owned the platform. And the service has fewer people to show those ads to. Similarweb reported that monthly active mobile users have decreased by almost 18 percent. from last September to this September.
The problems and user exodus on Twitter opened the door to many Twitter alternatives. Mastodon, a decentralized social network that existed before Musk took over Twitter, has seen tremendous growth and its underlying platform, ActivityPub, has become a powerful contender for the decentralized social media backbone. Bluesky, a different decentralized social network that originally started with funding from Twitter, has defined its own vibes and also gained waves of user registrations. The co-founders of Instagram just added posts to Artifact, their ai-powered news app. And there have been many other options, such as Mail, Hiveand Pebble (which launched as “T2” and is shutting down), showing up to take a bite out of it.
Meta, in particular, has launched Threads. None of these services have widely supplanted Twitter yet, but Threads, with “just under” 100 million monthly active users upon its launch in July, looks like the best contender to take the crown.
And as Twitter looks to shake things up, Musk’s decision to torch Twitter’s identity with the platform’s sudden name change to X stands out as perhaps the strangest decision of the year. Even the word “tweet,” which has become synonymous with “a short post on Twitter,” has passed in favor of the more nebulous “post,” which is what is done on basically every Internet platform.
A year later, X still exists, although it appears to be in a more fragile position than when Musk bought it. Users are leaving; Yaccarino provided a lower number of daily active users than Twitter had reported before it was acquired. The platform is under investigation by the EU for content about the war between Israel and Hamas, and the SEC is suing Musk over his refusal to testify about his purchases of Twitter shares.
X continues to survive, but the platform feels dramatically different from the so-called town square that Twitter once was. I don’t know if it will ever be that place again. And there is one thing that Musk can’t seem to shape the way he wants: despite the rebranding X months ago, the website It’s still Twitter.com.
