Elon Musk has recently been unbanning the Twitter accounts of many high-profile right-wing figures who were kicked off the platform prior to his ownership. To the dismay of the left, Musk has reinstated the accounts of former president Donald Trump, the Babylon Bee, and Jordan Peterson to name several.
However, Elon has indicated he will go even further with the mass reinstatement of accounts. He posted a poll on his Twitter page asking, “Should Twitter offer a general amnesty to suspended accounts, provided that they have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam?”
Should Twitter offer a general amnesty to suspended accounts, provided that they have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 23, 2022
As you can see, the people have spoken and 72 percent of voters indicated they would like to see a general amnesty provided. Elon responded to the poll results, “The people have spoken. Amnesty begins next week. Vox Populi, Vox Dei.”
The people have spoken.
Amnesty begins next week.
Vox Populi, Vox Dei.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 24, 2022
Platformer reported on the reinstatement of thousands of accounts following this poll:
“In fact, since Musk’s poll, Twitter has begun the process of reinstating roughly 62,000 accounts with more than 10,000 followers, Platformer has learned, including one account that has over 5 million followers, and 75 accounts with over 1 million followers. (The identities of the accounts could not be learned before press time.) Internally, employees have referred to this event as ‘the Big Bang’.”
“The project could cause more instability at Twitter at a time when the company is hemorrhaging engineering talent, according to current employees. Each reinstatement requires Twitter to rebuild a social graph, activating data on who the account follows and who follows the account. For large accounts like Trump’s, with 88 million followers, that’s millions of lists that Twitter has to update and maintain.”
Twitter has been hemorrhaging employees both through Musk’s mass layoffs and the resignations of disgruntled employees. Elon gave an ultimatum to Twitter staff that demanded difficult working conditions and long hours or to seek employment elsewhere.
Elon said:
“Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive work, we will need to be extremely hardcore. This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.”
Reports indicated that Musk has fired nearly 66 percent of Twitter’s staff since he has taken over the company. Apparently, he doesn’t plan on stopping yet either. Elon has indicated that employees should prepare for another round of layoffs to occur this week. According to internal employees, Elon is going to focus on trimming down the engineering managers this time.
Musk stated:
“As a reminder, all managers are expected to write a meaningful amount of software themselves. Being unable to do so is like a cavalry captain who can’t ride a horse.”
Some are starting to speculate that Musk’s management style will inspire other tech CEOs to restructure their own companies similarly. There is a consensus that Silicon Valley has become overstaffed by coddled, entitled employees who complain all the time and hinder the productivity of the company. Some company heads are starting to see this and could potentially lay down the hammer in a similar fashion to Elon.
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