18 November 2022 - Twitter closes offices
Twitter ‘closes offices’ after Elon Musk’s loyalty oath sparks wave of resignations
Josh Taylor (The Guardian, 18/11/2022)
The crisis at Twitter reached new heights on Friday as hundreds of employees were reported to have rejected Elon Musk’s ultimatum to keep working for the business, threatening its ability to keep operating.
As the company temporarily closed its offices to staff, Twitter users began saying their goodbyes and linking to accounts on other platforms.
Twitter’s Slow and Painful End
Charlie Warzel (The Atlantic, 17/11/2022)
When Elon Musk bought Twitter, the suggestion that he might run the platform into the ground was, for many, including me, a shorthand. Many supposed that Musk would roll back key moderation policies or reinstate some banned accounts, or that his ownership would be some kind of anti-woke Bat-Signal, flooding the platform with people who are attracted to social media for its capacity to alienate people.
The Case for Quitting Elon Musk’s Twitter
Kyle Chayka (The New Yorker, 11/11/2022)
Elon Musk has said that he took over Twitter to preserve its role as a digital town square. Judging from his first ten days leading the company, he has made it more like his own digital back yard, a place where he is free to shout nonsense at his neighbors, kick out his perceived antagonists, and capriciously revise the house rules. As a boss, he has been inscrutable and cavalier, directing his managers to fire nearly half of Twitter’s staff, over e-mail, then reportedly attempting to woo some of them back.
Elon Musk Demands Twitter Servers Explain What All These Wires For
(The Onion, 15/11/2022)
As part of his initiative to streamline the back end of the platform, Elon Musk reportedly demanded Tuesday that the remaining Twitter servers explain to him in detail what all the wires were for. “These ones here—what do they do, exactly?” the company’s new owner and CEO said during a visit to Twitter’s data center, holding up a tangled clump of blue wires and showing them to a row of machines, which he accused of “taking up an inordinate amount of space without contributing anything to user experience.”