The meta conversation has taken over Twitter for the last few hours. And no, I don’t mean that many messages have been published about Meta and/or the metaverse, I mean that the topic of conversation throughout the day, and on a global scale, has been the social network itself, after the last movement of Elon Musk who, according to multiple sources, has further decimated Twitter’s already rickety workforce after layoffs in recent weeks.
In case you know what has happened, the management of Twitter (that is, Musk himself) sent an email to all the employees who still remained in the company. In part it sounded like a motivational message, something very typical at this time, but it also demanded from the workers a level of total dedication to the company. Something that sounded like working overtime, giving up holidays, working more hours than clockwork… in short, what lately has been called crunching, and that those of us who are a little older call labor exploitation.
Musk’s master move on this occasion was to include, at the end of said message, a button that employees had to push only if they agreed to make such a commitment. And yes, given the doubts raised by the Twitter workers, the company published a list of answers to the most common questions in relation to that message, a list in which it was confirmed that not pressing the button would mean receiving two months of salary, a third party for compensation and, of course, being fired.
Although there are still no official numbers in this regard, the sources that I indicated at the beginning indicate that, despite the poor employment situation in the sector, with the layoffs from Facebook, Amazon and many other technology companies, there have been many employees who have decided not to accept the “challenge” posed by Musk and, therefore, they have joined those who have already left Twitter after the dismissal of half of its contract employees, and around 80% of its subcontractors.
As a security measure to avoid actions by former employees, Twitter has closed and will keep its offices closed until next Monday and, to try to save the situation, Elon Musk would have asked several Tesla engineers to dedicate themselves, at least temporarily, to Twitter. It doesn’t sound like a particularly brilliant plan, but hey, we’ll have to wait and see how events unfold over the next few days and weeks.
Beyond the hashtags dedicated to the death and farewell of Twitter, many of them in a comical tone but anticipating the end of the social network, what we have also seen have been some messages that affirm that we must be prepared for the social network to start failing at any time. Not because of sabotage or anything like that, but because the strength of engineers and developers has been so reduced that, according to this theory, they will be incapable of dealing with all the problems that can occur in the guts of the service.
Personally, I don’t think this is the end of TwitterI don’t say it for sure, because I don’t have it, but I think there is still room for their subsistence. Now, what does seem quite clear is that it will have to overcome a colossal reduction in workers, a large part of them essential, which will undoubtedly mark a contraction in it. And we will have to see how both users and, and this is key, advertisers respond to it.
