Elon Musk has completed his purchase of Twitter and immediately fired the CEO, CFO as well as the executive in charge of legal, policy and trust.
Musk fired the CEO of Twitter, Parag Agrawal, the CFO Ned Segal and the general counsel and the head of legal, policy, and trust Vijaya Gadde (@vijaya).
Vijaya Gadde was in charge of making Twitter safe for users, working to remove hateful speech and misinformation. She was also the executive who played a key role in banning ex-president Donald Trump.
It is also reported that the CEO and CFO were fired and escorted out of the Twitter headquarters (pic.twitter.com/vy5Cw7zttf).
Elon Musk has completed his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, and he has a message for advertisers. In an open letter to advertisers, Musk sought to explain what the future of advertising on Twitter will look like.
The message was vague on details and focused on aspirations for the kind of advertising Musk would like to see. He tweeted: "I also very much believe that advertising, when done right, can delight, entertain and inform you; it can show you a service or product or medical treatment that you never knew existed, but is right for you."
Elon Musk recently took to Twitter to explain his reasoning for buying the social media platform. He expressed his hope that Twitter can provide a necessary "digital town square" where people of all beliefs can debate in a healthy manner - without resorting to violence.
This is especially important, he argues, because social media has the potential to splinter into far-right and far-left echo chambers that only serve to generate more hate and division in society.
You can read his full letter to advertisers here.
Anil Dash, CEO of Glitch and board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, had a negative experience with Twitter's content moderation on the first day of Elon Musk's ownership of the company. He tweeted that every abuse report he made was rejected, saying that the accounts were not violating policy. Two of the reports were aimed at Black people, one was aimed at a Jewish person, each using a slur commonly used to target those groups.
In a blog post from April 2022, Anil Dash advanced the idea that the conversation surrounding Twitter and Facebook is not really about the right to free speech but rather it’s really a struggle between who controls social media and the social norms that will be allowed.
Dash wrote:
“It’s unusual to see the most powerful people in tech all bickering about who can control bad, broken technology.
But that’s what’s happening on Twitter and elsewhere as we’re seeing people assert that’s there’s a debate over content moderation or free speech.
That’s not true, of course. We’re not currently seeing a debate about “free speech”.
What we’re actually witnessing is just a debate about who controls the norms of a social network, and who gets free promotion from that network.”
It remains to be seen what the advertising landscape will look like now that the executive in charge of removing hate speech and misinformation is gone.
Advertisers are not happy when they see their brands next to negative tweets. General Motors has suspended its advertising on Twitter because of this. Many people on Twitter were already celebrating the lifting of what they feel were oppressive restraints on their free speech.