Reports of more layoffs at Twitter Inc landed on Monday as owner Elon Musk waded into a racism controversy that risked pushing advertisers further away from the struggling platform.
Musk called US media “racist” on Sunday after multiple US newspapers announced they would stop publishing a popular comic strip whose creator called black people a hate group.
Musk made his comment in regard to backlash to a rant by Scott Adams, creator of the long-running Dilbert comic strip — a satirical take on office life.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“For a ‘very’ long time, US media was racist against non-white people, now they’re racist against whites & Asians,” Musk wrote in a post on Twitter, where he has reinstated thousands of users banned for hate speech.
Under Musk’s leadership, Tesla Inc has been hit with multiple lawsuits alleging racism and researchers say hate speech has flourished at Twitter since his takeover.
“It’s as though Elon Musk is on a whirlwind tour to try to put Twitter out of business,” independent tech analyst Rob Enderle of Enderle Group said. “All he has to do is keep quiet, but he has to constantly spout stuff that alienates advertisers.”
The controversy came as the New York Times reported that Twitter had laid off at least 200 employees, or 10 percent of its already decimated workforce.
The fresh round of layoffs included product managers, big data experts, and engineers working on machine learning and platform reliability.
Twitter did not immediately confirm the reports when contacted by reporters.
Since Musk took ownership of Twitter, the platform has been riven by chaos, with mass layoffs, the return of thousands of banned accounts and major advertisers fleeing.
The app has also seen a string of technical snafus, including an incident where posts by Musk suddenly dominated the feeds of millions of users, even those not following the tycoon.
Meanwhile, Musk has encouraged users to communicate more freely on Twitter and said the site would impose the least amount of censorship allowed by law.
“Right now, you would have to be an idiot to advertise on Twitter,” Enderle said of the potential for marketing messages to appear near vile or harmful Twitter posts. “There is just too much downside risk of damaging your brand and alienating your customers.”
Analysis by firm Pathmatics by Sensor Tower found that more than half of Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers in September last year were no longer spending on the platform in January.
Musk has tried to wean Twitter from advertising and promote subscriptions as a new way to bring in cash — an idea that Facebook-owner Meta Platforms Inc is testing as well — but so far the results have been disappointing.
According to industry Web site The Information, about 180,000 people in the US were paying for Twitter as of the middle of January, which counted for less than 0.2 percent of monthly active users.
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