Twitter Layoffs Will Shrink Free Speech Around the World
Twitter Inc. — now under new management, if that's the right word — fired about half its workers over the weekend, a big story by anyone's standards. Yet some teams and countries suffered worse — and that is a story with global political implications.
In India, for example, Twitter seems to have laid off 90% of its employees. In Brazil, a team of 150 was let go, according to Bloomberg Línea. Shortly after Elon Musk took over the company, the number of employees with the ability to suspend or ban an account for breaches of user policies was at least temporarily reduced from “hundreds” to about 15.
Musk's vision for Twitter is not particularly complex. He views it as a software platform first, and only then as a social network. The company should care about the plumbing that lies behind the posts, not the posts themselves and how they connect to each other: Speech on the network should be largely unmoderated and unmediated. The obvious corollary is that Twitter's halls should filled with coders; all the “content” people are superfluous to the company's mission.
Yet Musk has said his goal for Twitter is actually to “empower the voice of the people” and to become “by far the most accurate source of information in the world.” Let's take these claims at face value. Do his actions further them? Can a company dominated by coders really fulfill those goals in places such as India, if it employs just a dozen people locally?
Musk's idea that unmoderated, unmediated speech on a values-free platform will lead to democratization and empowerment simply doesn't hold true in the countries where most Twitter users live. Half of the company's ad revenues come from the United States but over 80% of its users live elsewhere — most of them in
Read more on tech.hindustantimes.com
