Twitter.com: Where does Twitter go? What does Musk, Musk, and his team have to do to protect the public interest in 2024 elections?

The day after Elon Musk closed his deal to buy Twitter, the company’s Seattle office held a Halloween party for employees and their children. Rebecca Scott Thein wore bright green to play Buzz Lightyear. Thein, whose job at Twitter (now X) was to help the platform plan for and navigate elections, was driving to the party when an urgent call came in. A member of the policy team was on the phone. The company received a consent decree in Brazil threatening legal action about to be taken for holding presidential and governorship elections that were highly politicized.

Thein recalls arriving at an office of listless employees—many playing foosball and lounging about, as there was no work to be done. Shortly after Musk took over, the company had locked down many of its internal systems to ensure no changes were made during the leadership handover (and coming layoffs). Thein says that all of their systems were shut off after the active directory got shut off. She didn’t know who the leaders still worked for or who to bring the alert to. I just thought, ‘Oh, no, what do I do’ after I got the call. No one is online.

Thein now worries that what she experienced in those early days of Musk’s leadership was less a fluke than a harbinger. A year later, Thein, as well as other former employees and experts, worry that X, gutted by layoffs and helmed by a leader hostile to moderation, is careening toward disaster in 2024. It’s a year in which more than 50 countries—including the US—will hold elections.

X continues to survive, but the platform feels dramatically different from the so-called town square Twitter once was. I am not sure if it will ever be that place again. And there’s one thing that Musk can’t seem to mold the way he wants: despite the rebranding to X months ago, the website remains Twitter.com.

In a year that was supposed to bring aggressive changes to deal with bots and impersonation to the initial seeds of an “everything app,” the platform has instead been plagued by bad decisions of Musk’s own making — capped off by a baffling rebranding to the letter X. It’s facing more competition than ever and is looking at a truncated list of advertising partners that have left due to concern for its stability under Musk.

Immediately after launch, there was a fake Nintendo account with Mario flipping the finger and a fake Eli Lilly account saying that insulin is now free, jolting the real Eli Lilly’s stock price as a result. Now, after a relaunch to address the impersonation problem, replies are often filled with boosted posts of crypto influencers and people desperate for engagement so they can maybe make money off Twitter’s ad revenue sharing. Unsurprisingly, it’s become difficult to tell who actually has influence on the platform and who just pays for it.

Spending at the levels of the past doesn’t necessarily mean returning. According to Media Matters for America, Visa spent just $10 on Twitter in the weeks preceding Yaccarino’s comments, down from $77,500 before Musk bought the company. That explains why the platform’s US advertising revenue was “still down” 60 percent in September, according to Musk himself. Estimates given to Reuters indicate that ad revenue on the platform has decreased year over year every month since Musk has owned the platform. And the service has fewer people to show those ads to. Mobile monthly active users decreased by nearly 18 percent from last September to this September reported Similarweb.

What is the status of the Meta-to-Meta-Trees(X,Yaccarino) platform?

Threads was launched by Meta. The best choice to take the mantle is Threads, which has just over 100 million monthly active users following its July launch.

X is still around a year after Musk bought it, but it seems like it is in a more tenuous position than when he bought it. Users are leaving; Yaccarino gave a daily active user number that was lower than what Twitter had reported before it was acquired. The platform is under investigation from the EU over content relating to the Israel-Hamas war, while Musk is being sued by the SEC over his refusal to testify.