Elon Musk’s takeover of social media platform Twitter has been rife with trouble thus far, and it appears that there is more on the way still.
Musk, a controversial and eccentric billionaire already, gained control of Twitter for $44 billion, promising to make it a bastion for free speech and to “unlock” its full potential.
It become rather obvious rather quickly that this wouldn’t be the case, with Musk quickly suspending several users who overtly mocked him.
Furthermore, Musk’s policies led to a massive number of departures from the platform’s workforce, (some directly due to Musk’s employment decisions, other leaving on account of Musk’s other changes), and now the network appears to be suffering under the strain of this mass exodus.
The breakdowns so far aren’t in the core functions of Twitter — posting and reading messages — but around the edges.
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Copyright: Twitter’s automated copyright takedown system was no longer functional as of Sunday evening, Forbes reported, allowing users to upload chunks of copyrighted movies that remained online for hours before getting taken down.
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Hacked accounts: Users who have reported hacked accounts say the company has been slow to respond with solutions to recoup their profiles. One journalist who Axios spoke to said Twitter didn’t respond to their report for days, and when it did, couldn’t offer a viable solution to recover it.
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Security: Last week, some users reported problems trying to generate two-factor authentication codes via SMS text messages that would help them log into their accounts.
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Downloading data:
Others reported issues trying to download archives of their data, per Wired.
And this had advertisers running for the exits.
Advertisers are more concerned than everyday users.
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Some major advertisers paused their campaigns on Twitter as Musk took the reins.
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Advertisers are especially worried about a lack of oversight from trust and safety teams that monitored hate speech and misinformation on the platform.
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Marketers Axios has spoken to over the past week are citing slower responses by the company to reports about bad content appearing on the platform that their ads could appear against.
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Anonymous reports (like this one) are beginning to emerge suggesting that Twitter’s back-end ad technology isn’t working right, and users have reported seeing out-of-date ads in their feeds.
And then, in an apparent and exponential issue, the lack of advertising staffers has made it difficult for many corporations to maximize or minimize their marketing exposure on Twitter – an issue likely to compound the already well-understood financial woes of the social media machine.
