Elon Musk on Thursday said that the hate speech impressions on Twitter have declined by one-third from pre-spike levels and that Twitter has achieved a new record of having 20,000 per second. Both developments come a day after the new Twitter chief took a U-turn regarding the content moderation council while blaming a group of political and social activists.
The Tesla CEO in a tweet said, “Hate speech impressions are down by 1/3 from pre-spike levels. Congrats to the Twitter team! I have a mind to wag my finger at the 1500 accounts that caused the spike, but I shall forebear. Reducing the max allowed tweets/day to a number below what a speed typist on meth could do was helpful.”
Notably, earlier on the day, sharing the stats, the new Twitter CEO announced a new record of 20,000 tweets per second amidst the ongoing FIFA world cup. He said, “World Cup traffic hit almost 20,000 tweets per second today! Great work by the Twitter team managing record usage.”
The Tesla CEO also hinted at bringing back the suspended accounts. He launched an amnesty poll on Twitter asking the users if the social media platform offers a general amnesty to suspended accounts. In a tweet, he asked, “Should Twitter offer a general amnesty to suspended accounts, provided that they have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam?”
Ever since his acquisition of the microblogging platform, Musk claims he is on a mission to make Twitter the most accurate source of verification. To do so, Musk had announced that no major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes. However, earlier this week he said regarding the moderation council, “A large coalition of political/social activist groups agreed not to try to kill Twitter by starving us of advertising revenue if I agreed to this condition. They broke the deal!”
Moreover, Musk has been planning to introduce a new verification system for Twitter accounts. He earlier said parody accounts must include “parody” in their name and not just in their bio. He also said any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying “parody” will be suspended without any warning.
Also, the name change of any verified Twitter account will cause a temporary loss of the verified checkmark.
The Twitter Blue Tick subscription was slated to be rolled out in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK for $8 every month beginning November. Musk said the subscription cost will be utilised in ramping up the social media platform’s dampening revenue. But Musk put an indefinite hold on its launch saying the pause will be in effect until there is high confidence in stopping impersonation.
These developments come at a time when Twitter is facing mass resignations and mass layoffs. Last week, he told the Twitter staff that going forward the company will be revamped to Twitter 2.0, with a major focus on design and product and a 40-hour work week.
He said that Twitter 2.0 would require long hours of working at high intensity while giving an ultimatum to the employees for either going ‘hardcore’ or going home with severance pay. Following this, several disgruntled employees resigned from the company.
However, on Thursday, he thanked the remaining Twitter employees for working late into the night. In response to a tweet, Musk said, “To be fair, there are many people at Twitter working late into the night, for whom I have great respect.”
