Moderator Note
Attack the post, not the poster. You’ve been around here more than long enough to know this. Take it to the Pit if you want to have a go at another user.
LOLOMG
Some of the responses to that tweet are great;
At risk of unnecessarily documenting the bleeding obvious:
… my opinion, and Jack Dorsey, I want to be clear, shares this opinion, is that we should not have perma-bans
– Elon Musk, May 10, 2022, Financial Times “Future of the Car” conference
There’s no need for “Elon Musk” parody accounts – he’s doing a fine job all on his own.
Wow, if the twit-verse has any sense, there’d be a mass movement this evening of multi thousands of people naming their accounts Elon Musk. I am Spartacus!
Now now, a permanent ban is not the same thing as a permanent suspension. They’re totally different words!
Yeah, this is going SUPER GREAT.
#IAmSpartaMusk
I’m not sure if I would trust that story–one of the writers is a real nightcrawler.
Not just a good illustration on why ‘free speech’ is so hard, but also a good illustration of how a company like Twitter ends up with so many employees.
And before we get this argument here:
Yes, this is a freedom of speech issue. These people are being banned for their speech. Normally I would say “Fine. They’re a private website.” But Musk himself argued the opposite. He’s the one who said permabans harmed free speech.
And yet that is his solution. Not to do the obvious and remove their verification, or add disclaimers to their page (if he was really worried people were confused). Not even saying “Label this as parody, change your name, or get banned.”
Nope. He just permabanned people for showing the flaws in the verification system—but only the ones who were mean to him. He’s showed he never really meant freedom of speech, and just plans on trying to control what people can say.
Hence he is worse for freedom of speech than previous Twitter. I honestly thought he was smarter than this, and would try to thread the needle a bit, especially after the mass firing backfired. Seems he’s more easily riled into stupidity than I thought.
It is not uncommon to lay workers off en masse and then hire back the ones you actually want. It happened in my last job. Mass layoffs avoid all kinds of legal issues, prevent peoole from suing for wrongful termination, and it’s better for the employees because at least in Canada if you lose your job as part of a layoff you can collect unemployment benefits immediately with no waiting period. It also looks better on the employees’ resume to lose their job as part of a mass layoff instead of being let go individually.
So the company has a layoff, then invites certain people to re-apply.
Of course, it could also have been a screw-up.
Perhaps, but then you should obviously do so in a way that wouldn’t piss those people off. There’s no need to blindside them with the layoffs, resulting in their being a big news story about your employees suing you for wrongful termination.
There’s also no reason to not tell the advertisers that this is what he’s doing. Yet we know from at least one person that all they knew is he fired 75% of the people in charge of moderation.
So even if he was planning to hire them back (and isn’t just reacting due the advertisers scaring him) he still screwed it all up royally.
And he’s supposed to be good at this. This is literally his specialty: managing the takeover of companies and the PR of such. It’s why he gets all the kudos of Tesla, for example. But he can’t seem to handle the basics.
I’ve seen quite a few times where a mass layoff is followed by the positions being opened for application (often simultaneously), but always to the whole universe, not targeted to specific people.
That said, they laid off 3,700 people, and are supposedly inviting “dozens” back, and if it really is so small number, it’s hard to think it was that big a mistake.
Late-era Howard Hughes just holed up in his room watching movies by himself, not trolling the whole country. And Hughes physically put his own life on the line to test his aircraft designs and was nearly killed multiple times, he was a true hands-on engineer’s engineer. Musk has never had the balls to do anything remotely close to that, he might as well be a brain floating in a jar. With that being said, I’ve always loathed Twitter in every way and I view its forcible condensation of big ideas into bite-sized Tweets to be unbelievably detrimental to society and the collective intelligence of the entire world. I have always hated Twitter, I have never used it and never will use it, and if Musk totally destroys it, I am fine with that.
I’ve been at companies that announce a big down-sizing and then change their minds before it goes into effect. I’ve also been at companies that try to bring individuals back. But I would be skeptical that it was anyone’s plan all along. There are costs to eliminating positions and little benefit – any wrongful termination suit is extra hard to prove after a mass reduction.
After a mass reduction, it’s harder to keep the employees you didn’t eliminate. They get spooked by the reduction, have bigger workloads, realize they aren’t getting severance, etc. How would you effectively attract talent back in this position?
And why would a tech employee go back? Their vested equity got purchased at $54.20, half the employees are gone so friends are gone and workloads are doubled, the company just completed a (somewhat) hostile takeover, and the CEO is acting erratically at best. They’ll get new tech jobs – if they hadn’t already lined them up.
Kathy Griffin has been banned for making fun of Elmo.
The self-inflicted implosion of Twitter presents the tech sector with an unheard-of opportunity, in which a major player unilaterally removes itself from the niche it dominates and leaves a service vacuum ripe for someone else to claim. I guarantee you the Slacks of the world are looking really hard at how quickly they can move in to offer an alternative as soon as it’s clear Twitter will collapse. And if those competitors have any brains at all, they are already speed-sifting through the laid-off staff looking for the key people, because putting them on payroll means Twitter can’t get them back. It’s an easy way to pour some gasoline on a rival that’s busily setting itself on fire.
(It’s similar to the motivation for GM, VW, etc. suspending their advertising on Twitter while Musk blunders around. They are joining the many other companies that want to keep their distance from the shitshow Twitter content will rapidly become, yes, but also anything that damages Musk generally could have an impact on Tesla’s financial situation. It’s a no-brainer angle for carmakers to attack their competition.)
That’s a pretty funny post. It does also highlight the current pickle Musk is in.