Amid content adjustment controversy and layoff, Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk has lamented a massive drop in revenue which he put on activist groups pressurising advertisers to boycott Twitter platform.
Musk tweeted that though nothing has changed with content moderation since he purchased the social media platform, activist groups are however determined to keep advertisers off Twitter.
Already, General Motors, Ford, General Mills, and Volkswagen are some of the top global companies that have suspended advertisements on the platform while a handful number of brands stated they are given close eyes to the new policies that will accompany the change of ownership.
Activists and civil rights groups are concerned that Elon Musk will open the platform to hate speech and misinformation while he would reinstate Twitter accounts that have been banned for such reasons.
“Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists. Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America,” he tweeted on Friday.
It would be recalled that the world’s richest man, Elon Musk completed the acquisition of Twitter in late October in a deal worth $44 billion. Immediately afterward, he sacked top executive members of the company which include the CEO and CFO.
Investors King also reported that Musk had gone ahead to lay off about half of Twitter’s workforce in a bid to cut down costs and raise profitability.
Early Friday, about 70 percent of the company’s workforce in India was sacked while a significant number of employees were also sacked at the company’s African office situated in Ghana.
The massive layoff is part of Musk’s plan to increase Twitter’s revenue from $5 billion in 2021 to more than $26 billion in 2028 as he claimed.
However, the massive drop in revenue and a potential boycott ahead obviously shows that Elon Musk is not having it easy managing the microblogging platform while his lofty dream of raising revenue might be threatened by an alternative social media platform ‘Bluesky’ created by former Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey.