Elon Musk has solely been accountable for Twitter since late October. However already, he’s turned the corporate and its platform the wrong way up.

Within the days after Musk took over, he booted high executives, slashed rank-and-file headcount, pushed engineers to work tougher, and started fast-tracking a hodgepodge of probably revenue-generating options, together with charging customers to get or preserve a verification test mark.

And whereas Musk didn’t instantly change any of Twitter’s insurance policies towards offensive content material, within the hours after Musk took over there was a notable surge in hate speech on the app. A number of the customers posting felt emboldened by Musk’s “free speech absolutist” perspective, and actively tried to check the boundaries of what they may say on Twitter below the corporate’s new management.

Many present and former workers, social media lecturers, and human rights advocates are involved that Musk may change Twitter for the more serious, turning it into an much more intense cesspool of damaging content material than it already is. However others hope Musk can breathe new life right into a platform that was already bleeding its most prolific customers and, for years, has struggled to show a revenue.

Listed here are among the most vital methods Musk has modified the corporate to this point.

Gutting Twitter’s workers

Musk started his reign as Twitter’s chief by firing high executives. Inside hours of the deal closing, CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, and head of authorized coverage, belief, and security Vijaya Gadde have been proven the door.

The week after he took over, Musk continued firing executives, together with Twitter’s advert chief, common supervisor of core tech, and chief advertising officer Leslie Berland (who just some days earlier despatched a cheery word saying that Musk was visiting the San Francisco workplaces). He additionally pulled in additional than 50 Tesla engineers to work for Twitter and assembled his personal circle of trusted advisers.

Now, Musk is transferring on to gutting Twitter’s rank-and-file workers. He has reportedly laid off an estimated 50 p.c — upward of three,700 workers — from the corporate. Twitter knowledgeable its workers that layoffs would occur by 9 am PT on Friday in a company-wide e mail. By late Thursday night, a number of workers instructed Recode or posted publicly on Twitter that they’d already been locked out of their work e mail and Slack accounts with none formal discover of whether or not they had been laid off.

These cuts are the biggest in Twitter’s historical past, and several other present and former workers Recode spoke with are involved that consequently Twitter’s operations as a platform could possibly be in danger. Musk has additionally reportedly deliberate to slash $1 billion from Twitter’s infrastructure prices, reminiscent of server area, in line with a report from Reuters, furthering these issues.

Whereas Musk hasn’t addressed workers straight concerning the cuts, on Friday afternoon Musk mentioned the layoffs at an investor convention. He framed the layoffs as essential as a result of earlier than the deal, “Twitter was having fairly critical income challenges and value challenges,” in line with the New York Occasions.

Forward of the layoffs, some workers have been combating to maintain their jobs and show their worth to the corporate by engaged on particular high-priority initiatives, lots of them at Musk’s course.

A number of Twitter workers instructed Recode that some colleagues labored 12-hour shifts over the weekend and slept on sofas within the workplace to be able to make Musk’s grueling deadlines.

“We’re making an attempt to shoot our shot,” mentioned one Twitter worker.

However many workers who have been pulled into particular initiatives and labored grueling shifts have been nonetheless laid off, sources instructed Recode.

One Twitter worker described the morale on the firm after the layoffs as low, and mentioned that many colleagues who survived this spherical of cuts want they’d gotten laid off and gotten severance as a substitute. Twitter is giving many laid-off workers full pay and advantages via no less than January, though it’s not clear if this utilized to all workers, notably these outdoors the US, sources mentioned.

Shortly after the cuts, a bunch of 5 workers sued Twitter in a class-action lawsuit, alleging the corporate did not notify them of the approaching layoffs as required by the federal Employee Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, or WARN Act, that requires sure employers to provide a 60-day discover for mass layoffs within the US.

Emboldening the trolls

Musk has mentioned his major cause for purchasing Twitter was to make it a haven at no cost speech. He’s echoed conservatives’ longstanding issues that Twitter is politically biased towards right-wing speech regardless of the lack of proof of that bias.

Conservative politicians like former president Donald Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) have celebrated Elon Musk’s possession of Twitter as a significant win, with Trump saying he’s comfortable that Twitter “will now not be run by Radical Left Lunatics and Maniacs.”

However Musk’s extra laissez-faire philosophy on content material moderation has additionally brought on one other group of individuals to have a good time: trolls spreading racist, sexist, and in any other case hateful speech.

One instance: There was a 500 p.c enhance in makes use of of the n-word on Twitter within the 12 hours after Musk’s deal was accomplished, in line with a examine from the Community Contagion Analysis Institute, regardless that none of Twitter’s guidelines have modified on the matter.

Twitter has mentioned it’s engaged on decreasing the visibility of those posts. However information factors like this have spooked a number of main advertisers that don’t need their model affiliated with offensive content material, together with Basic Motors, Volkswagen, Audi, and Pfizer — who’ve are ready to see extra about what course the corporate will take below Musk’s management earlier than they resume adverts.

Musk has tried to relax advertiser issues by tweeting a public word saying that he doesn’t need Twitter to show right into a “free-for-all hellscape.” On Thursday, Musk spoke with leaders of civil rights teams just like the NAACP, the Anti-Defamation League, and Colour of Change, promising them that Twitter takes hate speech critically, and that he gained’t reinstate any banned accounts (e.g., Trump) till after he units up a content material moderation advisory council, which he mentioned will no less than take a number of weeks.

Musk additionally instructed civil rights leaders he would reverse his determination to restrict the quantity of workers who can entry content material moderation techniques, one other one in every of their issues.

However by Friday morning, civil rights leaders organizing below the banner “#StopToxicTwitter Coalition” mentioned that Musk had failed to carry true to his guarantees — and ramped up their calls for for main advertisers to pause all adverts on the platform, Musk tweeted on Friday that Twitter had a “huge drop in income” because of “activist teams” who he accused of making an attempt to “destroy free speech in America.”

It’s not simply advertisers which might be leaving Twitter due to Elon; there are additionally early indicators that Elon’s takeover and the ensuing negativity are inflicting some customers to depart.

One report in MIT Expertise Evaluation estimated some 877,000 accounts have been deactivated within the week after Musk’s deal closed. That’s greater than double the same old quantity in that very same time interval, in line with information from the agency Bot Sentinel that MIT Tech Evaluation cited.

After all, these are all estimates, and solely from a brief window of time. Twitter has additionally been dropping its most dear “heavy tweeters” in droves for some time now, in line with a leaked inside report lined by Reuters, and that predates Musk’s takeover. However time will inform whether or not Musk exacerbates Twitter’s present downside of customers fleeing the platform.

Shaking up Twitter’s inside tradition

Musk has been working Twitter in his personal means, much like how he runs his different firms: in an advert hoc and intense vogue. Quite than speaking to his workers first, Musk typically tweets no matter he’s considering, together with his plans for the corporate.

Twitter workers have obtained little official communication, reminiscent of emails or corporate-wide Slack messages, so removed from Twitter’s government management since Musk formally took over. One worker who spoke with Recode on the situation of anonymity referred to as it an “data vacuum.”

That’s been an adjustment for a lot of Twitter workers who’re used to a extra measured, communicative, and structured work tradition. One nameless Twitter worker instructed the Washington Submit that the work environment below Elon was like “working in Trump’s White Home.”

Workers are turning to non-public or nameless communication platforms like Blind, Sign, and Discord to commiserate, a number of workers instructed Recode, since they now not really feel they are often candid on inside Slack or e mail.

One other main change Elon is making to Twitter’s inside tradition is to drastically ramp up the tempo at which new options are developed.

Usually, product modifications like those that Musk is proposing — reminiscent of charging customers for verification — would take months and even years to implement at Twitter. Now, workers are being requested to execute them virtually in a single day.

This might drive the form of innovation that Twitter, a money-losing enterprise, would possibly want. But it surely may additionally go away workers demoralized, or worse, compromise the reliability and safety the app supplies to its lots of of tens of millions of customers. Twitter already has present issues on this entrance: Former Twitter head of safety and inside whistleblower Peiter Zatko warned that the platform “was over a decade behind business safety requirements” in September.

Making individuals pay for blue test marks

The primary official product change that Musk confirmed after taking on Twitter was to begin charging $8 per thirty days for “blue test marks” — or the verification badges that Twitter at present offers to public figures like journalists, politicians, and celebrities.

The concept is that verification can be a part of a premium “Twitter Blue” subscription that individuals pay for, which incorporates different advantages like fewer adverts and extra visibility in your Twitter replies to different individuals’s threads. Musk desires to open up verification to extra individuals — not simply journalists, politicians, and celebrities — so long as they’re keen to pay that value.

This has brought on main debate amongst people who find themselves at present verified — lots of whom mentioned they aren’t keen to pay to maintain their verification. After the well-known creator Stephen King complained concerning the authentic $20-a-month price ticket being floated round, Musk jumped in his replies to barter right down to $8. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-NY) gave her personal critique of the plan, mocking Musk’s “energy to the individuals” framing of what’s in the end a paid function.

Twitter verification was designed to verify individuals actually are who they are saying they’re on-line. This does a service to Twitter’s person base by decreasing scams, serving to to confirm trusted information sources, and stopping individuals from falling for impersonations. Musk’s plan to let anybody pay their means into verification (and per the New York Occasions, Twitter is contemplating eliminating ID checks, in order that anybody will be whoever they need) may run the danger of undermining the belief verification is meant to offer.

Throwing different concepts on the wall

Apart from charging for Twitter verification, Musk has been planning a complete new set of modifications to the platform. Whereas none of those are confirmed but, they’re reportedly within the works or being examined.

These modifications embrace making individuals pay for sure sorts of “excessive threat” video content material (many are speculating it will be grownup video content material), in line with the Washington Submit; bringing again Vine, the short-form video app Twitter acquired and later shuttered; altering the login web page to the discover web page; and charging individuals for sending DMs to high-profile customers.

For now, it looks as if Elon is throwing a bunch of concepts out to see which of them work. As one investor in Musk’s deal, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, mentioned on the Internet Summit convention in November, he expects solely 10 p.c of Musk’s concepts “will stick.”

To this point, lots of Musk’s concepts (like Vine and paid movies) are previous ones that Twitter has already tried — and failed at.

Over time, it’ll turn out to be clear if Musk will have the ability to efficiently resurrect these previous concepts — and his new ones, like paying for a test mark — with a really completely different work tradition and workers than Twitter had earlier than.

We’ll preserve updating this submit as Musk continues to form Twitter, for higher or worse.

Replace, November 4, 6 pm ET: This story has been up to date with new particulars concerning the Twitter layoffs.