A year ago, billionaires and new owners Musk walks in At its headquarters in San Francisco, with its white bathroom sinks and smiles, Twitter fired its CEO and other executives and began transforming the social media platform into what is now X.
X looks and feels a bit like Twitter, but the more time you spend with it, the more you realize it’s just an approximation.Musk has dismantled Twitter’s core features — its name and blue bird logoit is Verification systemit is Trust and Safety Advisory Group.not to mention Content moderation and hate speech law enforcement.
He also fired, dismissed or lost most of its workforce — Engineers who keep the website running, Moderator Who prevents it from being drowned in hatred, senior executive Responsible for setting rules and enforcing them.
The result, long-time Twitter observers say, is that the platform is no longer an imperfect but useful way to keep track of what’s going on in the world. What will the X become, and can Musk realize his ambition of turning it into one? “Everything Apps” What everyone uses is still as unclear as it was a year ago.
“Musk has failed to make any meaningful improvements to the platform and is no closer to his vision of an ‘everything app’ than he was a year ago,” said Insider Intelligence analyst Jasmine Enberg. “On the contrary. , X has driven away users and advertisers, and now it has lost its primary value proposition in the social media world: becoming a central hub for news.”
As one of the platform’s most popular and prolific users, even before acquiring the company, Musk had a unique experience on Twitter that was markedly different from that of the average user.But many of the changes he made to X were based on his own impressions of the site—in fact, he even Polled his millions of fans Asking for advice on how to run it (they said he should step down).
“Musk’s view of the platform as a technology company that he could reinvent, and his vision, rather than a social network driven by people and advertising dollars, was the biggest reason for Twitter’s demise,” Enberg said.
A blue checkmark once indicated that the person or institution behind an account was who they said they were — a celebrity, an athlete, a reporter for a global or local publication, a nonprofit — now simply indicates someone Pay $8 per month Subscription services can elevate their posts above unchecked users. It is these paid accounts that have been found to be spreading misinformation on the platform, which is often amplified by the platform’s algorithms.
For example, on Thursday, a new report from the left-leaning nonprofit Media Matters found that many Blue Check X accounts with tens of thousands of followers claimed, Mass shooting in Maine This is a “false flag” planned by the government.Researchers have also discovered that such accounts are spreading misinformation and propaganda about the Israeli-Hamas war—so much so that the European Commission established a formal, legally binding Request information Charges were brought against X for his handling of war-related hate speech, misinformation and violent terrorist content.
Prominent foreign policy expert Ian Bremmer posted on It’s different from any information I’ve ever been exposed to.” the scientist. “
It’s not just the platform’s identity that’s unstable. Twitter was already in financial trouble when Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion in a deal that closed on October 27, 2022, and the situation seems even more precarious today.Musk took the company private so its accounts are no longer public — but in July, the Tesla CEO said the company had lost about half of advertising revenue and continues to face a huge debt burden.
On July 14, he posted on his website that “our cash flow remains negative” due to “advertising revenue is down approximately 50%, coupled with a heavy debt load.”
“We need to be cash flow positive before we have anything else,” he said.
In May, Musk hired Linda YaccarinoFormer NBC executives with close ties to the advertising industry have tried to lure top brands back, but the efforts have had little success. While some advertisers have returned to the
Insider Intelligence estimates X will bring in $1.89 billion in ad revenue this year, down 54% from 2022. The last time its ad revenue came close to that was in 2015, when it was $1.99 billion. In 2022, this figure will be $4.12 billion.
External research also shows that people use X less often.
According to data from research firm Similarweb, global web traffic to Twitter.com fell 14% from the same period last year, and traffic to advertisers’ ads.twitter.com portal dropped 16.5%. The performance on the mobile side was not much better, with the total number of monthly active users on Apple iOS and Android down 17.8% from the same period last year.
“Even though Twitter’s cultural relevance had begun to decline,” before Musk took over, “it was as if the platform no longer existed. It was a death by a thousand cuts,” Enberg said.
“What’s really fascinating is that almost all of the wounds are self-inflicted. Usually when a social platform starts to lose its relevance, there are at least some external factors at play, but that’s not the case here.”
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