Twitter employees have fled or been fired in droves. Scores of big dollar advertisers have jumped ship with promises to never return. Journalists and pundits are daring to critique CEO Elon Musk who appears hell-bent on a scorched earth policy that has engulfed the micro-blogging platform in the flames of spite and dissent.
Big-name companies and marketers, the ones with billions in advertising budget and media leverage, have not just abandoned Twitter, they have moved to the attack.
“His (Musk) willingness to leverage success and personal financial resources to further an agenda under the guise of freedom of speech is perpetuating racism,” writes McDonald’s marketing chief Tariq Hassan in a leaked email revealed by Semafor.
Colgate-Palmolive’s VP and GM of Consumer Experience, Diana Haussling, responded to the same email string noting that marketers (companies spending advertising money) must be “mindful of the harmful and often racist rhetoric of Elon Musk.”
Companies like McDonald’s, General Mills, Coca-Cola, Starbucks, and many others no longer advertise with the platform and/or no longer Tweet – going silent and moving their messages to other platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and others. McDonald’s last Tweeted some five months ago.
According to a report from Media Matters for America, half of Twitter’s top 100 advertisers are no longer advertising on the platform. Advertising has tanked, usage had dropped, and billions of dollars in market value has no doubt been cleaved-off the outrageous sum of $44 billion that Musk forked-out for the once darling social media company.
Tweeters follow the trend: the number of Twitter users in the US has decreased, as of the New Year, by almost 10% since Musk took over. According to a recent study, 32.4% of Americans were using Twitter in October, 2022. By early January, Twitter use had dropped to 29.5% of Americans. Not surprisingly, since Musk reinstated Donald Trump as a user on Twitter, use among Democrats has fallen; use among Republicans has risen (though Trump, always one to stick to a grudge, has refused to use it). However, Pew Research, long held as the preeminent stalwart in tracking social media use in the US, finds Twitter use considerably lower: only 23% of Americans use Twitter, as of the Spring of 2022.
Musk and Twitter’s relationship with journalism is even more prickly. Technology writer and pundit, Casey Newton, founder of Platformer, predicted that media outlets and journalists who rely on Twitter to “set the daily news agenda by default for the entire US press” would turn on Twitter and abandon it for other channels.
“Elon Musk’s continued promotion of right-wing causes and personalities will push away more and more high-profile users, who find themselves increasingly put off by his shock-jock antics and whim-based approach to content moderation,” writes Newton.
Musk’s battle with the media, in fact, has become institutionalized at Twitter. Twitter's communications team has not responded to any media request or answered any journalist question or query since November 2022, when it suffered near total extermination in the layoffs Musk executed shortly after buying Twitter.
Twitter’s own communications (press) account responds to media requests only with an automatic reply: a poop emoji. This is not a joke: the vainglorious Musk’s preferred response to a media query is to heave a digital pile of sh*t at any querying journalist. Musk confirmed and announced his poopy reply to all future journalists' inquiries via a tweet.
Twitter’s response to my interview request of Mr. Musk, was short and predictable:
Despite Musk’s casus belli and open disdain for ‘liberal’ media, journalists and media outlets continue to use Twitter in great numbers. The major networks, and their media affiliates and subsidiary channels all use Twitter to this day including the large bastions of the so-called liberal media, among them the CBC, BBC, CNN, NBC, ABC, and New York Times.
“Among the 900 or so tech and media professionals I follow, usage is basically steady,” writes Casey Newton. “The timeline may scroll a little more slowly than it used to, but everyone is still showing up for their daily dose of sparring for retweets.”
One notable exception is National Public Radio (NPR). NPR is a favourite target of Musk, who has branded the US-based not-for-profit media outlet as “state-affiliated media,’ the same status applied to Russian and Chinese government-controlled media outlets. The stamping of NPR as “state-affiliated” conjures up memories of the Soviet dictator Stalin who helped consolidate his power by attacking and closing any media outlet or channel that dared criticize his rule.
"NPR stands for freedom of speech and holding the powerful accountable," says NPR CEO John Lansing. "It is unacceptable for Twitter to label us this way. A vigorous, vibrant free press is essential to the health of our democracy."
NPR does receive some minimal funding from U.S. federal agency and department grants, but NPR says these monies account for “less than one per cent” of NPR's annual budget. Twitter’s own guidelines said that "state-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the U.K. or NPR in the United States, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy." This suddenly changed last week, and NPR has now been removed from this sentence on Twitter’s own website.
Curiously, in response, NPR has stopped Tweeting from its main Twitter account (@NPR), but subsidiary accounts for NPR Politics, NPR music, NPR Books, etc., continue to Tweet away.
Clearly some journalists have vacated Twitter while others have decreased the volume and frequency of their tweets, but they are still there, in some number. And despite the exodus of big-name advertisers, some will remain and continue to leverage the social media platform, as will millions of users. However, the pattern and path are clear: Twitter is in decline and under siege, and this ideological battle may yet be the modern technology equivalent to the infamous siege of Leningrad during World War II. A prolonged siege fought not over days, weeks, or months, but years; the forces of good and evil fighting for the symbolic home of traditional rulers, then like Twitter today, under new management, when the autocratic communists and its totalitarian dictator seized control of the people, the platforms, and the message.
Elon Musk bought Twitter for billions, more than mere pocket change, but is not running Twitter as a business or a democracy. The new totalitarian dictator of the former ‘people’s platform’ is now ruling Twitter with an iron fist and as a personal vanity project with little care or consideration for the people, and certainly not for its advertisers or the journalists that made the platform what it is today.
The Siege of Twitter has only just begun.
Toby Ward is a business technology writer, digital consultant, and founder of Prescient Digital Media (@tobyward). He has been a Twitter user since 2007 and was among the first 60,000 users of the platform. He expects to be blocked or removed from Twitter shortly.
