Elon Musk wanted to make money from Twitter. So far this doesn’t seem to be working.
What about the news service Twitter, half a year after it was taken over by Elon Musk? “Twitter’s big crash didn’t happen,” says Jürg Tschirren, SRF digital editor. The intelligence service works, but is less reliable than it used to be, and there are always glitches and problems.
One of the most serious mishaps on Twitter was that messages intended only for friends were suddenly shown to others.
What problems arise? According to the digital editor, users are increasingly reporting that content is being displayed to them that they do not want to see. There are also reports that people cannot log into their accounts. “One of the most serious mishaps was that messages that were only intended for friends were suddenly shown to others,” he says. This glitch raised doubts among many users as to how secure personal messages on Twitter are at all.
How can such mishaps happen? Twitter has laid off 80 percent of the workforce in the last six months, instead of around 7,500 employees, only around 1,300 people work there. According to Tschirren, it is difficult to assess how reliably those who remain can still take care of security and the functioning of the platform.
How is Twitter doing financially now? Twitter is a private company. It does not have to publish regular business figures. The last figures available are from the second quarter of 2022, and Twitter made a loss of $270 million. Advertisers who left after Musk’s takeover have returned, claims Elon Musk. So the company is about to make a profit in the next quarter. However, according to Tschirren, there is also a rumor that Musk himself said to his employees that Twitter was only worth around half of the amount he paid for it.
Has Musk Introduced New Earning Opportunities With Twitter? “No,” says Tschirren, and the plan to get users to pay eight dollars a month for a verified account is apparently not working either.
Legend:
The verification discussion revolves around this check mark.
KEYSTONE/DPA/Stefan Jaitner
A verified account can be recognized by the white tick on a blue background next to the account name. It is estimated that only two per thousand of the Twitter community is willing to pay this subscription fee. And many companies are not willing to pay the $1,000 that a verified account costs for an organization. However, accounts that are followed by at least a million people seem to have kept their blue tick, regardless of whether they’re willing to pay for it.
Has Twitter usage gone down? There are no independently collected figures for this either. Estimates are that usage has gone down, but Musk says the opposite, says Tschirren.