Elon Musk Is Finally Resigned To Making X More Like Old-school Twitter
Source: Fast Company, Chris Stokel-Walker
Photo: X and Diego PH/Unsplash
A series of changes to the platform highlights the challenges of running a social media platform—no matter how radical its owner claims to be.
When Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022, he promised to stick up a middle finger to propriety. He ran roughshod over the platform, pulling hosting servers while they were still operational and ultimately firing about 80% of the company’s staff. Twitter’s eventual rebrand as X was then positioned by both Musk and his CEO, Linda Yaccarino, as a move toward a radically different app—one that goes beyond social media to also offer messaging, banking, shopping, and much more.
But 16 months later, a number of the changes Musk initially enacted have been unwound or reversed, as reality has hit the billionaire’s “idealistic” vision.
Some of those changes are small: In mid-2023, Musk dithered over making dark mode the default and sole color palette on X, before deciding to ditch the plan entirely. He’s also restored headlines to links posted on the platform, an about-face from a few months prior, when he claimed scrubbing that information would improve the app’s aesthetics.
Other changes have been more significant. In late January, ahead of an appearance by Yaccarino in front of the U.S. Senate, the company announced it would be hiring 100 content moderators to staff a new “Trust and Safety center of excellence” based in Austin, Texas. The 100 staff are a small fraction of the number fired in the immediate aftermath of Musk’s takeover of Twitter—when entire content moderation teams were gutted within days. But it’s a start, and an acknowledgment that X is, inch by inch, becoming more like old-school Twitter than Musk first envisaged.
X did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but former staffers are unsurprised by the rollback of some of Musk’s initial changes. “There does appear to be a way to run a service, and even in pure spite, Elon can’t escape that,” says one former Twitter content moderation staffer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The former moderation staffer pointed out that it’s partly market pressure at work and partly the threat of government regulation—it’s notable that the Austin moderation hub was announced just before Yaccarino appeared in front of elected officials—but that it also highlights the gulf between how Musk wants to run things, and what he’s actually able to accomplish. “His idea of innovation is so skewed from how practically things work,” says the former staffer. “It’s an amazing case study for trust and safety, and wider online guidance.”
The Musk experiment of getting rid of most of its content moderation workforce was a radical experiment, and one that ultimately highlighted the importance of a trust and safety division. “With Twitter, Elon gutted all that and showed everyone what happens,” the former staffer says. “It’s pure evidence of what it takes to make a service usable and safe.”
Whether Musk will be able to staff up that Austin center is another challenge, says a second former employee fired by Musk who also asked for anonymity. “Anyone worth their salt in trust and safety would never, ever work with him, especially after what he did to Yoel [Roth],” they say. Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, stepped down from the role in 2022; shortly thereafter Musk falsely claimed that Roth had once argued “in favor of children being able to access adult internet services in his PhD thesis.” That incident alone may make it harder to wind the clock back on content moderation.
“If you think about it, people who work in trust and safety and moderation are considered and thoughtful, and like to spend a lot of time—potentially, too long—thinking about the nuances of a term or an issue,” says the former employee. “Nobody who is that considered is going to work for Musk. It would be career suicide.”