The Elon Musk FreakoutLeft melting down over what he's doing to Twitter -- but user experience seems unaffected by his cuts. What does that say?
Rod Dreher
Nov 18, 2022
The policy changes underway at Twitter by its new owner are roiling the commentariat. This is the lead story right now at The New York Times:
Hours before a Thursday deadline that Elon Musk had given Twitter employees to decide whether to stay or leave their jobs, the social media company appeared to be in disarray.
Mr. Musk and his advisers held meetings with some Twitter workers whom they deemed “critical” to stop them from leaving, four people with knowledge of the conversations said. He sent out confusing messages about the company’s remote work policy, appearing to soften his stance on not allowing people to work from home before warning their managers, according to those people and internal emails viewed by The New York Times.
All the while, two people said, resignations started to roll in. By the deadline, 5 p.m. Eastern time, hundreds of Twitter employees appeared to have decided to depart with three months of severance pay, the people said. Twitter later announced via email that it would close “our office buildings” and disable employee badge access until Monday.
The exits added to the turmoil at Twitter since Mr. Musk, 51, completed his $44 billion takeover last month. The billionaire has laid off half of Twitter’s 7,500 full-time workers, fired dissenters and told employees that they need to be “extremely hard core” to make the company a success.
On Wednesday, Mr. Musk gave Twitter’s remaining employees just under 36 hours to leave or commit to building “a breakthrough Twitter 2.0.” Those who departed would get the three months of severance pay, he said. He positioned the move as a way to make the company the most competitive it could be, though the action also provided an opportunity to further cut costs and purge the firm of disaffected workers.
The shedding of so many employees in such a compressed period has raised questions about how Twitter will keep operating effectively.
Well, what is "effectively"? I have seen no change at all in my Twitter experience since Musk took over. Does "operating effectively" mean the stifling censorship that had been a common experience of conservatives using the site stays in place? A lot of people on the Left seem to think that without that, Twitter can't do what it's supposed to do. Does "operating effectively" mean that whinybutt Millennials and Gen Z employees get to trash their boss on Twitter and on its Slack channels? Musk has been firing people who do that, as he should. It is one thing to give constructive criticism within a closed environment at one's place of employment; that sort of thing is important for the healthy functioning of the business. But it is quite another to believe that employees should have the unlimited right to tear down their boss and his business in public. Since when, in the history of the world, has that been permissible? The sense of entitlement of those Twitter employees is appalling. It seems to be generational, though. The young Jacobins working at major newspapers behave this way too, as I recall from the Summer Of Floyd. It causes a toxic work environment. If you despise the mission of the company and hate its leadership, whatever the company is, then leave. This idea that you should still be able to collect your paycheck while denouncing your paymaster publicly is cracked. It's the childish mentality of the college student who hates his parents and tells them so, but still expects them to pay his bills.
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Maybe there's something going on here that I don't see (so I reserve the right to revise my opinion), but what this looks like to this longtime Twitter user is that the censorious Left is losing its control over one of the world's most important communications platforms, and that seems to those people like catastrophic injustice. Half the employees of the company have been fired, but whaddaya know, the thing still works! What does that tell you?
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-elon-musk-freakout/
