Wednesday, November 23, 2022

POSTMODERN ROBBER BARON

Twitter Reportedly Stiffs Vendors, Cuts Employee Benefits As Musk Tries To Cut Costs

Story by Matt Salter • Yesterday 

In the ongoing saga of Elon Musk's adventures on Twitter, we've seen a variety of business strategies. He's issued ultimatums. He's made commitments to bold new moderation strategies that never materialized. He's even staged open polls on the future of the platform. At the risk of stepping on the man's own joke, he's throwing the kitchen sink at his problems.


twitter hq building dublin seagull© Charles Mcquillan/Getty Images


As of November 22, Musk is trying a truly remarkable new strategy: he's just not going to pay what he owes.

As the New York Times reports, Musk has been desperate to cut costs as his employees have bailed en masse and he struggles to keep the lights on. Sources inside Twitter have reported that Musk is now flat-out refusing to pay vendors for outstanding debts, to the point of instructing them to duck calls from collectors. Those sources also indicate that a major target of Musk's fixation on cutting costs may be the benefits of Twitter employees.

We and the Times agree that Musk will probably pay what he owes. He's likely just playing negotiation hardball, seeking a favorable settlement by dangling the possibility of nonpayment. Twitter is under massive debt pressure: the Times reports $13 billion in debt from the acquisition alone. Musk is likely, and understandably, frustrated over having to service debts from before his tenure, many of them incurred by people who no longer work for him.

A bigger problem might be Musk's desire to cut employee benefits. Per multiple sources, Musk brought in long-term allies Steve Davis, Jared Birchell, who heads Musk's family office, and Antonio Gracias, a friend, and former director of Tesla tasking them to slash expenses and target benefits. Everything from expense accounts and corporate credit cards to food quality in the cafeterias has suffered since.

Musk is playing with fire. Twitter has already shown serious problems with employee retention during Musk's tenure. Making Twitter a less pleasant place to work won't help. Moreover, refusing to pay contractually obligated expenses is "take your company away from you and sell it for scrap"-level illegal. Having already been on the wrong side of the SEC and with a possible FTC investigation looming, Elon Musk has shown a worrying willingness to play chicken with law enforcement. For stakeholders seriously committed to Twitter as a digital public square, antics like this threaten the value of the platform and discourage potential collaborators.

What Elon Musk's destruction of Twitter tells us about the future of social media

Story by Blayne Haggart, 
Associate Professor of Political Science, 
Brock University • Monday,  
Nov. 21,2022
THE CONVERSATION

Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter has been a fast-moving disaster. It has also created a tangible problem for journalists, politicians, activists and academic scholars: Where do we talk to each other if or when Twitter finally collapses or becomes unusable?



Since its beginnings in 2006, Twitter has grown into one of the most important social networks in the world.© (Shutterstock)

It’s a useful question. Contemplating life without Twitter pushes us to look beyond Twitter’s odious underbelly to consider what we liked about it. In doing so, it can help us understand better what social media is, for better and worse, and to consider what we want it to be.

Twitter communities

What I will miss about Twitter is its large scale and reach. It has become the default way for so many groups to communicate with each other and, because it’s basically just one big message board, across groups.

Social media companies regularly argue that this scale is why there is so much hate speech and disinformation on their networks. As harmful as this speech may be, Twitter’s reach has nonetheless been a boon for, say, emerging researchers wanting to easily reach the largest number of their peers.

Smaller online communities are fantastic for any number of reasons. They allow members to share their interests and knowledge. Their smaller size makes them easier to moderate effectively. However, their smallness can also inhibit the serendipity of running into ideas that you wouldn’t otherwise see.

Furthermore, smaller online communities still depend on the benevolence of whoever happens to be in charge of the server. Twitter’s open design somewhat mitigates against the formation of strict hierarchies among groups on the platform, although as we’re learning, commercial social media still leaves us subject to the owner’s whims.

The end of Twitter


Thinking about where to go after Twitter also highlights that social media networks are not substitutes for each other. Well, they are for advertisers, who will go wherever the audience is. But people use different social media for different purposes.

As an academic, TikTok has nothing to offer me in terms of creating and sharing knowledge with my peers. The Twitter-like Mastodon may allow for easier communication among colleagues, but it lacks Twitter’s out-of-community reach.

That there is no equivalent substitute for Twitter highlights that there is a strong public interest in fostering public social media, to provide communities with stable communication infrastructure.

Relatedly, this debacle also confirms that advertising does not provide a sustainable business model for socially responsible social media. Twitter has only turned a profit in two of its 16 yearsAdvertisers are currently abandoning Twitter in the face of Musk’s content-moderation follies which, combined with Musk’s incompetence, could drive the company into bankruptcy.

Related video: Is Twitter descending into chaos?

View on Watch



Elon Musk demands all Twitter employees email him weekly updates on their work

Most important, however, its ad-based business model is based on the viral spread of content designed to engage our attention at any cost, be it bullying, harassment or hate speech. As journalism professor Yumi Wilson notes, “Twitter was a scary place even before Elon.”

Life after Twitter


All this suggests that we need to think seriously about how to move beyond ad-funded social media. Mastodon on its own offers a decentralized, community-based paradigm. However, depending on the long-term commitment of volunteers and small operators is itself a recipe for instability.

Read more: People are leaving Twitter for Mastodon, but are they ready for democratic social media?

Much more interesting is the proposal that Mastodon-based services could be used by an arm’s length public agency like the CBC to publicly fund stable, well-run social media.



Social media platforms, like Twitter, rely on the attention economy to make profits.
© (Shutterstock)

Searchability


Finally, we need to talk about search engines. Twitter is valuable in part because it allows individuals to broadcast easily to a large audience. Without large-scale social media, we’re back to the problem of how to discover other people’s work and how to get your work in front of an audience.

Search engines have flown under the radar in our discussions about how platforms should be governed. If we want to reduce online platform power and make the best information easily locatable, we need to reconsider whether our current search engines are good enough.

There is cause for concern: Google’s gold-standard search engine has been “getting worse,” in large part because the company has been clogging its results with advertising that makes it more difficult for users to find relevant information. Given that the big online platforms continue to rely heavily on advertising revenues, this is a problem that will worsen.

Let’s not glorify Twitter. It is, in many ways and for many people, a malevolent force. Even pre-Musk, it was a breeding ground for harassment, particularly of women and individuals from marginalized groups. It can enable often life-ruining bullying and disproportionate public shaming of otherwise private individuals, particularly through the quote-tweet function.

Twitter has had a negative effect on the quality of our social discourse, serving as a conduit for mis- and disinformation, designed to encourage outrage rather than substantive conversation.

As bad as it was — and is — you don’t know what you got till it’s gone. Twitter pre-Musk was no paradise, but Musk’s rampage allows us to see both the good and bad in social media as it currently exists. And, as a result, to consider what we want (and need) social media to be.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts.

Read more:

Why it may not matter whether Elon Musk broke US labor laws with his mass firings at Twitter

Blayne Haggart receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He is a Senior Fellow with the Centre for International Governance Innovation.

The age of the toxic boss is over: Workers aren't willing to suffer for a paycheque anymore

Story by Victoria Wells • Yesterday 


Hundreds of Twitter's employees headed for the exits after Elon Musk issued an ultimatum: get ready to work© Provided by Financial Post

If Elon Musk ‘s disastrous takeover of Twitter Inc. has proven anything, it’s that the time of the heavy-handed boss is well and truly behind us. Workers just aren’t willing to suffer for a paycheque, and they’ll quit to prove it, as Musk found out last week.

Hundreds of Twitter’s employees headed for the exits after Musk issued an ultimatum: get ready to work “long hours at high intensity” or leave with a three-month severance package. People overwhelmingly decided to quit. Before the 5 p.m. Thursday deadline, internal Slack channels were flooded with staffers posting emojis of blue hearts and salutes as they said goodbye. Sensing the impending wave, Musk tried to convince some workers he considered essential to stay on, according to a report in the New York Times . He failed. The employees he had been lobbying in a video meeting all logged off at 5 p.m. while he was still making his case.

The exodus was so great that on Friday, #RIPTwitter started trending as users became certain the platform would crumble with few engineers left to patch the cracks. Twitter’s workforce has been cut to the bone since Musk got the keys at the end of October. He immediately laid off 3,700 workers, or roughly half its workforce, and then fired many more, reportedly getting rid of anyone who dared criticize him.

The mass resignations should have been a wakeup call for Musk, who has often bet on wielding power over his employees by threatening to fire them if they don’t toe the line. At Tesla Inc., he put an end to remote work , ordered staff back to the office and fired those who refused. He issued a similar directive at Twitter, only to later walk it back in an effort to staunch the bleeding of workers.

That could be a sign Musk is beginning to learn what most other bosses have discovered during a time of labour shortages and sky-high job vacancies: don’t underestimate the power of the worker. That power is likely to stay where it is for longer than some expect, because hiring challenges will persist for years, says a workplace trends report from Indeed, a job postings site, and Glassdoor, with an aging population the main driver of shortages in Canada.

Hybrid work is the future, but expect to be in the office more often than not

“What is critical for leaders to understand is that these changes and shifts are not temporary. There will be no return to ‘normal’ that many seem to be awaiting,” Svenja Gudell, Indeed’s chief economist, says in a news release .

That means bosses will have to give workers what they want if they hope to avoid more hiring problems. And what they want shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention these past few years: flexibility, higher pay, better benefits, the ability to work from home, workplace well-being policies and diversity strategies.


Employers in Canada seem to be paying attention. Job listings for remote work are on the rise, making up 11.2 per cent of all postings in September on Indeed. That’s four times the pre-pandemic rate, and a sign of things to come. “Remote work is here to stay,” Brendon Bernard, senior economist at Indeed Canada, says in a blog posting .

Meanwhile, employees are finished with toxic work environments. Almost half of employees in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom expect a level of happiness at work, says Indeed’s latest workplace well-being study . Those who are content with their work environment are also much less likely to leave their current employer for greener pastures — just ask any recent ex-Twitter employee.

At this point, no worker with any pride is going to subject themselves to a boss who demands intense overtime, little work-life balance and unnecessary full-time office mandates, especially if their skills are in high demand. There’s a better way, and employees have seen it in action. In many cases, they’ve lived it.

Layoffs have hit some companies, but there are still close to a record million job vacancies in Canada. There’s always another job out there offering better benefits, flexibility or the opportunity to work from home a few days a week. Bosses better figure that out or else they could find themselves holding the reins to the shell of a company, not unlike a certain seemingly oblivious billionaire.


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