A year after Musk's Twitter takeover, X remains mired in turmoil

SAN FRANCISCO

 A year ago Elon Musk purchased X, formerly known as Twitter, taking the platform on a journey that has resulted in lost money, advertisers and trust.

Musk closed the $44 billion deal on Oct. 27, 2022, facing a lawsuit that held him to terms of purchase he was keen to escape.

In the days after his purchase, Musk quickly fired executives who had been running Twitter and took the publicly traded company private.

He also laid off most of the San Francisco-based company's workers, cutting ranks to fewer than 1,500 from 8,000.

Twitter employees were asked to commit unconditionally to their jobs and forego any notion of telecommuting.

In July, Musk did away with Twitter's globally recognized bird logo and changed the platform's name to X.

In the months following his takeover, Musk gutted content moderation, restored accounts of previously banned extremists, and allowed users to purchase account verification, helping them profit from viral - but often inaccurate - posts.

Musk defended such changes in the name of free speech.

Steps taken by Musk at X "have sparked increased sharing of misinformation and hate speech," PolitiFact in a report, echoing an array of groups tracking toxic content on social media.

This month the European Commission announced an investigation into X for alleged dissemination of bogus information and terrorist content regarding the conflict between Israel and Hamas.

Over the past year, the platform's advertising business partially collapsed as marketers soured on X.

Insider Intelligence forecasts that X will finish 2023 with $2.98 billion in ad revenue, compared to $4.14 billion in 2022.

Musk early this year said the company's value had more than halved to $20 billion.

Musk started charging for features once free at Twitter in an effort to make money from subscriptions.

He has suggested charging all X users, but the idea was widely panned. Industry analysts said it would make X even less appealing to advertisers.

"X's wounds are almost entirely self-inflicted," Insider Intelligence analyst Jasmine Enberg told AFP.

"Musk's treatment of the platform as a technology he could remake in his vision, rather than as a social network powered by people and ad dollars, is the single largest cause of advertiser exodus, user decline and loss of its place as a central hub for news."

While speaking at a recent tech conference, Yaccarino estimated the number of daily active X users at 225 million, a drop of more than 10 percent from when Musk bought the company.

Twitter quitters have become a diaspora of sorts, spread across Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads and other platforms in search of a new social media home.