Twitter is a Private Company

Thank you for teaching me a new term: Swatting. I know the action, didn’t know there’s  a collective noun for it. cheese


So amongst all the nightmare stuff going on @ Twitter right now, you might not have heard that as of sometime Thursday afternoon (it’s now Saturday a.m.) all the Australian office space was let go. That is, with no notice, Twitter no longer has offices in Australia. Employees turned up to work yesterday but couldn’t get in. As the day progressed, equipment they had (or software they had access to) began failing/locking them out. By early yesterday evening, all the chaos unleashed in the US helped to make a little more sense of what’s not-happening here. 
Let’s multiply this around the world…do you think the company will survive another 2 weeks???  tongue rolleye


joanne said:

So amongst all the nightmare stuff going on @ Twitter right now, you might not have heard that as of sometime Thursday afternoon (it’s now Saturday a.m.) all the Australian office space was let go. That is, with no notice, Twitter no longer has offices in Australia. Employees turned up to work yesterday but couldn’t get in. As the day progressed, equipment they had (or software they had access to) began failing/locking them out. By early yesterday evening, all the chaos unleashed in the US helped to make a little more sense of what’s not-happening here. 
Let’s multiply this around the world…do you think the company will survive another 2 weeks??? 
tongue rolleye

Frankly, I can't figure out why Twitter had 7000 employees in the first place.

What do they do?

Except for content moderation , Twitter seems to be something you can run out of your garage. (a big garage)


I don't know if 7,000 people is the right size or not, but staffing a global business can quickly add up. The engineering portion will take up a bit. It's not just the core functionality of posting and reading messages, but also the ad tech, auth, security, running infrastructure, multiple platforms for all of this (web, ios, android), data pipelines (to feed both the ad side, for business insights, for driving features such as the sorting algorithms, etc). And of course there's more to a software company than just the software and hardware. Sales of course has its whole organization. Lawyers (complicated enough just operating in the US, and twitter's international), HR, facilities (someone has to clean the kitchens, vacuum the floors), etc. And somewhere in there the content moderation teams that news stories always want to focus on I suppose.

Is that 7,000 people? I'd be more inclined to think you could lose closer to 20% than the 50% it seems Musk's summarily firing, but we'll find out I guess.


PVW said:

I don't know if 7,000 people is the right size or not, but staffing a global business can quickly add up. The engineering portion will take up a bit. It's not just the core functionality of posting and reading messages, but also the ad tech, auth, security, running infrastructure, multiple platforms for all of this (web, ios, android), data pipelines (to feed both the ad side, for business insights, for driving features such as the sorting algorithms, etc). And of course there's more to a software company than just the software and hardware. Sales of course has its whole organization. Lawyers (complicated enough just operating in the US, and twitter's international), HR, facilities (someone has to clean the kitchens, vacuum the floors), etc. And somewhere in there the content moderation teams that news stories always want to focus on I suppose.

Is that 7,000 people? I'd be more inclined to think you could lose closer to 20% than the 50% it seems Musk's summarily firing, but we'll find out I guess.

I guess.

It would be nice to see a breakdown of the 7k workers. I actually looked into this a while back, but couldn't find anything.


The entire Human Rights team was sacked. 


dave said:

The entire Human Rights team was sacked. 

Obviously too woke for the chief twit.


drummerboy said:

dave said:

The entire Human Rights team was sacked. 

Obviously too woke for the chief twit.


Twitter (and other soc media) got stuck in the midst of a fake news issue in the Ethiopia / Tigray war.  I think it went completely under the radar of the Human Rights team.  Elon being African may have been in tune with this more, but how resolving future similar issues is still in question.  He seems to be in a buyer's remorse phase.


(I was out for a few hours and couldn’t respond )

It’s still doesn’t explain the lack of warning and explanation for broken leases, and other non-employee contracts. That’s gonna add up, not to mention tarnish reputations and relationships, all over over the world.very thoughtless of him. 


https://wapo.st/3T6EUyz

Devastating cuts to Twitter’s workforce on Friday, four days before the midterm elections, are fueling anxieties among political campaigns and election offices that have counted on the social network’s staff to help them combat violent threats and viral lies.

The mass layoffs Friday gutted teams devoted to combating election misinformation, adding context to misleading tweets and communicating with journalists, public officials and campaign staff.

The layoffs included a number of people who were scheduled to be on call this weekend and early next week to monitor for signs of foreign disinformation, spam and other problematic content around the election, one former employee told The Washington Post. As of Friday morning, employee access to internal tools used for content moderation continued to be restricted, limiting staff’s ability to respond to misinformation.

==============================================================

Chief Dickhead couldn't wait until after the midterms. Had to be done NOW because reasons.


This guy is all part of this “new world order” Putin keeps talking about. He’s not an American citizen at heart. He’s just hijacked an airplane and is going to crash it right into the heart of this country, which is really the center of democracy globally. I never liked him, never trusted him. Just another white supremacist. 


In the OP?  If so, the popular refrain when it came out that twitter was clearly censoring some of its users and this censorship seemed targeted at a specific part of the political spectrum and others who questioned the popular narratives like the Covid Orthodoxy was:  Hey man, Twitter is like a private company, so they can do what they want.   But it does look like there was collusion.  And that information continues to come out. 

So, really I wanted to see who here were driven by principles.  I think its clear that most don't really have any principles.  It doesn't really matter.  As long as those being censored are what you consider "The other side" or "the enemy" its a good thing.  I think I've summed this thread up pretty well. 

People here like to smear.  Look at the Herschel Walker thread.  A paragraph from a book is pulled out of context and people will believe the worst.  Why?  Its convenient to smear someone as a racist, homophobe, Nazi, etc.  That way, you don't need to wrestle with any real ideas.  

This has been the driving intellectual thrust of the left for at least 5 years.   There are no new ideas, but only smears and warnings about "the other side". 



terp said:

So, really I wanted to see who here were driven by principles.  I think its clear that most don't really have any principles. 

Nobody posted anything here which could lead you to that conclusion.


nohero said:

Nobody posted anything here which could lead you to that conclusion.

When you lead with a conclusion, you're freed from having to find anything to support it.


terp said:

People here like to smear.  Look at the Herschel Walker thread.  A paragraph from a book is pulled out of context and people will believe the worst.  Why?  Its convenient to smear someone as a racist, homophobe, Nazi, etc.  That way, you don't need to wrestle with any real ideas.

You mean the Hoppe book? People made very good points based on reading the ideas expressed, and they're not refuted on that thread.  Instead of smearing them on this thread, you could respond there.  


On the topic of free speech and content moderation on social media, I thought this was by the former Reddit CEO was a very interesting read (apart from the weird in-content ads for the author's tree-planting initiative)

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1586955288061452289.html


PVW said:

nohero said:

Nobody posted anything here which could lead you to that conclusion.

When you lead with a conclusion, you're freed from having to find anything to support it.

LMAO!  Read back through the thread.  


terp said:

PVW said:

nohero said:

Nobody posted anything here which could lead you to that conclusion.

When you lead with a conclusion, you're freed from having to find anything to support it.

LMAO!  Read back through the thread.  

Spoiler alert - Reading back through the thread won't change anyone's mind to agree with your conclusion, "So, really I wanted to see who here were driven by principles. I think its clear that most don't really have any principles."


nohero said:

You mean the Hoppe book? People made very good points based on reading the ideas expressed, and they're not refuted on that thread.  Instead of smearing them on this thread, you could respond there.  

I'm more wondering about the context that would make that paragraph less awful.


ml1 said:

nohero said:

You mean the Hoppe book? People made very good points based on reading the ideas expressed, and they're not refuted on that thread.  Instead of smearing them on this thread, you could respond there.  

I'm more wondering about the context that would make that paragraph less awful.

It's not context that you're lacking, it's the mindset.


paulsurovell said:

Great thread (trending):

https://twitter.com/search?q=%22Go%20Elon%22&src=trend_click&vertical=trends

clicking that link was the biggest waste of time of my week. 


ml1 said:

paulsurovell said:

Great thread (trending):

https://twitter.com/search?q=%22Go%20Elon%22&src=trend_click&vertical=trends

clicking that link was the biggest waste of time of my week. 

the transformation of paul into a musk fan boi has been very entertaining so far.


Musk could very well be trolling us all.


ml1 said:

paulsurovell said:

Great thread (trending):

https://twitter.com/search?q=%22Go%20Elon%22&src=trend_click&vertical=trends

clicking that link was the biggest waste of time of my week. 

I disagree.  It reveals a lot about Paul. Examples -


nohero said:

ml1 said:

paulsurovell said:

Great thread (trending):

https://twitter.com/search?q=%22Go%20Elon%22&src=trend_click&vertical=trends

clicking that link was the biggest waste of time of my week. 

I disagree.  It reveals a lot about Paul. Examples -

Are you staying on Twitter?


If I understand this, it will make Twitter more competitive with MOL


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