So Elon has halved the headcount but users will only drop by 5%? Sounds like sound business to me.

And most likely the 5% most tediously lefty twitter users. Double win!

Pre-Musk, Twitter was a an antisemitic platform that allowed child porn and intentionally interfered in elections.

But Musk is the problem...

You forgot, their guy won so it isn't interfering.

> Pre-Musk, Twitter was

I don't know if you're serious about your specific accusations or merely using them as placeholders.

If it's the latter case, it's indeed a good point that Twitter (like Facebook) were not exactly poster children *before* the acquisition.

Whether it will be better once the dust settles, it remains to be seen. I'd give it one year or so before passing judgement.

(Yes, I know some fanatic is going to shout at me because [insert accusation of something terrible here]. If it makes you feel better, go ahead.)

Poor thing. How can you exist in the same sphere of influence as your hated lefties??

I suggest Iran, they are very welcoming.

We feel sorry for them as they do not know any better. The hatred is coming from them.

If your comment is regarding lefties hating...

I suggest you do some actual research on how many lives have been lost to right-wing political activities versus left-wing, at least in the United States.

Get back to me after you do...and get a clue.

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/10/27/in-america-far-right-terrorist-plots-have-outnumbered-far-left-ones-in-2020

https://www.adl.org/news/op-ed/right-wing-extremist-violence-is-our-biggest-threat-the-numbers-dont-lie

Only when you class everything that doesn't fit your ideology as 'far right'. Walking up behind someone and blowing their brains out or running someone over as you think they might be right wing is pretty bad. And the lies about Jan 6th to make a legitimate protest seem worse than the BLM protests.... How many people were murdered during the BLM protests and the whole CHAZ/CHOP thing?

BLM: not a lot, it was mostly property damage.

See, you are trying to justify a stance without factual evidence. BLM was mostly riots, versus right-wing terrorist actions. Read, and learn.

I think you need to do the learning. Terrorism is:

"The use of violence or the threat of violence, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political goals".

"Resort to terrorizing methods as a means of coercion, or the state of fear and submission produced by the prevalence of such methods."

That is BLM and antifa summed up perfectly. Do as we say or we will do bad things.

The factual evidence is someone with a bad case of TDS walked up behind someone and shot them. Another person, again with TDS, ran over someone as they thought that person didn't share their political ideology. A car was shot up in the CHAZ and at least one occupant killed while they filmed it and congratulated themselves about it. At least 2 other black people killed by others in the CHAZ/CHOP. Numerous people have been shot at or shot by far left protesters. David Dorn was murdered by BLM protesters while looting.

The left is the side of hated and destruction.

Two AC accounts providing an excellent demonstration of what is wrong with twitter.

> I suggest Iran, they are very welcoming.

Actually, they are. By far some of the most welcoming, polite and approachable people I have ever met.

I cannot speak as to their government, but Iranians are a great bunch.

> And most likely the 5% most tediously lefty twitter users.

I'm sorry but I take issue with calling anyone "leftie" in this context.

The pro Trump bunch certainly aren't.

The anti Trump bunch certainly aren't either.

Take those who supported the "BLM" thing. Where are they when it comes to Palestinian lives? Or to the 3,000+ lives senselessly lost in the Mediterranean every year? Or to actually stopping the war in Ukraine? Or in Yemen? Or to caring about the people of the Central African Republic or the DRC? Those people not "black" enough?

They're not leftists. They're not fighting for a better world. They're not fighting injustice. In fact, they're not fighting at all, just hating. That is not the left.

(Rant over)

Payroll may be halved, but how does that compare to other costs such as data centres and network, presumably they will not change ?

The biggest difference compared to before is that Twitter borrowed $13B in order to buy itself from shareholders. This is now costing $1B in interest per year. Which is a bit more than what Twitter is saving by having fired 5k employees.

> Twitter borrowed $13B

Nope, the group of investors (led by Musk) who bought Twitter did.

A leveraged buyout places the debt on the bought out company.

According to a story in the New York Times, Musk has directed his people not to pay its vendors nor its landlords. That ought to produce a noticeable savings, I'd think.

There may, of course, be some slight service disruptions when landlords padlock the offices and vendors cease delivering goods and services. How well does a Twitter server room run when the electricity is shut off for non-payment?

The engine on your car will continue to run even if you don't change the oil filter. Up until the point it doesn't.

> The engine on your car will continue to run even if you don't change the oil filter

Which oil filter? :)

In fact, which engine? :o)

Is that 32 million actual users or 32 million bots?

The bots will stay. They don't cause him any trouble, they just piss people off. I think twitter has bigger problems right now!

Musk was complaining about the number of bots when trying to back out of the purchase deal.

Now he's boasted about getting the user count up to a billion, the software team are probably doing little else than writing the bots that he will count as users to enable him to claim that the target has been reached.

In order to leave Twitter, one must first be a Twitter user. I don't use Twitter, I have never used Twitter, and to the best of my knowledge no one I associate with uses Twitter.

I do see news articles about said on Twitter. It really seems Twitter is a platform for to get an audience they would not otherwise have. I wonder how many live humans have Twitter on their devices, actively monitor it, and actively post to it.

Or maybe I live in a bubble and my personal experience does not represent Twitter's actual user base....?

Why the hell would you read an article about Twitter and then come on here to post that you don't use it and you don't know anyone who uses it? Truly bizarre. Not just that, but you keep doing it. There's several like this from a month ago.

It's a bit like someone writing to their local paper to complain about what goes on in the local pub, which they have never been to and don't know anyone who goes to... but they can only imagine the shenanigans that they must get up to in there?

Hehehe, good point. Maybe it is because people like you will follow me here. And you wouldn't know I existed on a different platform....like Twitter.

There are no "people like me". I'm a unique little snowflake.

> Why the hell would you read an article about Twitter and then come on here to post that you don't use it and you don't know anyone who uses it?

For better or worse, it's clearly an influential platform worth discussing about whether or not you're a user (I'm not either).

> I don't use Twitter, I have never used Twitter, and to the best of my knowledge no one I associate with uses Twitter.

That's two of us. :)

If it ever did become a platform for balanced and civilised debate, then I might consider it, but it would need to come with strong privacy safeguards, which I see as unlikely.

"There won't be one catastrophic event that ends Twitter,..."

Musk was the one catastrophic event.

Liberate tutemet ex inferis (Save yourself from hell).

I'm not sure if that's true or not, but it's certainly been *fun* watching it happen these last couple of months.

I'm mainlining Twitter several times a day, like it's a white powder. (I'm probably mixing my drug metaphors here - don't do drugs kids, it addles your brain).

May you live in interesting times.

I am a less profitable Twitterer. I rarely originate a tweet but I comment on other peoples ones. Does that make me less profitable to him?

I opened a Mastodon account in the spring but didn't do much with it until a month ago. I have tried to put people on it that I follow on Twitter. I will do my online debates there more often but I will hang onto both and see. Perhaps Musk will drop it before completely destroying it. There's only 8,432,428 accounts on mastodon at present anyway (15:00 14/12).

> There's only 8,432,428 accounts on mastodon at present anyway

The number of active users is much, much less, and because of its fragmentation you cannot see much of what goes on in other servers than yours unless you have multiple accounts (and even so).

Also, there is some very sick people in there and no mechanism to encourage a healthy exchange of views. The whole platform is designed to exclude those who don't think like you (via multiple blocking mechanisms) rather than to find points in common.

Lastly, by the third time your account is deleted because you posted something (perfectly civil) that your server admin does not agree with, you start to realise that that's not really the place to be (if you run your own instance, you'll find an admin that doesn't agree with you and he's going to block his users from reaching you, without asking them of course, and try to get your server added to their version of Spamhaus. Very sad altogether.)

This assumes Twitter will still exist in a year's time.

Given the number of law-suits Musk is currently attracting for doing things like failing to pay severance pay, trying to turn offices into dormitories, and getting rid of legally mandated mechanisms for tackling abuse, and the fact that advertisers, the only source of income apart from trying to charge people for coloured ticks, are fleeing like rats from a sinking ship that is also on fire, I'd be very surprised if Twitter doesn't file for bankruptcy well before then.

I see the angry Muskovites are here to readily downvote anything remotely critical of their messiah.

“Good. I can feel your anger. I am defenseless. Take your weapon. Strike me down with all your hatred, and your journey towards the dark side will be complete.”

I'm pleased to see another sober, balanced article on the subject, following the recent one from Richard Curie.

Contrary to what Williams claimed in a now hidden comment accompanying the other article, I don't really care whose side you take (if any) as long as the information is factual and balanced and opinions are clearly marked as such.

Thanks.

.. by not paying his dues, like the salaries and severance payments of the people he threw out and the rent for Twitter offices around the world.

According to the [1]New York Times , staff has been instructed not to pay vendors in anticipation of lawsuits.

Quote: "Twitter’s leaders have also discussed the consequences of denying severance payments to thousands of people who have been laid off since the takeover, two people familiar with the talks said. And Mr. Musk has threatened employees with lawsuits if they talk to the media and “act in a manner contrary to the company’s interest,” according to an internal email sent last Friday."

Add to that that the changes at Twitter has drawn the attention of regulators, in the US because there is an FTC consent decree in place and in the EU because pretty much disabling content management will break new EU laws aimed at reducing exposure to the resulting online junk and I really cannot see this last much longer.

What's more, it is possible that the other companies also start taking direct hits. Musk has taken people from Space X to fill the vacancies of lawyers he threw out, and ditto for Tesla IT staff. Given that he wants those companies to run as lean as possible it logically follows that he has thus been removing people that actually cannot be missed there (the price you pay for (too) lean tends to be a massive lack of resilience).

As I have said before, maybe it's time someone educated the man about the concept of "consequences"..

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/13/technology/elon-musk-twitter-shakeup.html

Why educate him? If it turns out he's right, then it's not really education.

If it turns out he's wrong, then just think of the benefit of him really, truly being seen as wrong.

There are those who will defend his every fart - despite some very high profile screw-ups. A few are doing the five stages of grief thing as he comes under more critical public scrutiny. Then there is the cohort that only care about the politics and just want someone "like them" to be in charge, and who will accept any amount of poor behaviour and even outright fraud to get that.

In no cases does education make things better.

According to the New York Times, staff has been instructed not to pay vendors in anticipation of lawsuits.

Rather a self fulfilling prophecy. If you don't pay your suppliers you can usually expect law suits.

...unless you're one of their major customers, and the lack of liquidity from you not paying them means they can't afford lawyers...

It wouldn't be the first time that people have been put out of business by this sort of tactic, and it should be stamped on a lot harder.

If I had any sort of commercial relationship with Twitter, right now I'd be demanding cash up front, like utilities do with people who have bad credit ratings.

It says "proliferation of hateful or other unsavory content"

I thought, from what I have read *, that Twitter has supposedly been like that for ages - that offensive content could easily be found - if so would anyone notice a difference?

I know when I do periodic inspections of what dross is caught by my email spam tools (just in case any false positives, there sometimes are - but the false positives are mainly recruiter emails which, TBF, do strongly resemble spam in some of their language use) I have noticed some junk mails with links to FB or twitter URLs, so have long assumed a fair amount of crap / suspect content hosted on social media sites.

*Unsurprisingly not really a social media user (things such as comments in El Reg & other forums about as close as I get) so social media knowledge mainly reliant on what I read online / in the press, but have read plenty of Twitter cesspit type of stories over the years