The European Union has prepared unpleasant surprises for the purchase of Twitter Mask

The buzz around Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition continues to echo here and there. While the billionaire has appointed himself CEO of the newly acquired company, its employees are gloomily preparing for mass layoffs. And European politicians are hinting to the richest man in the world that he, with his platform and declared love of freedom, will have to play by their strict rules, while US senators are concerned about national security issues.

Elon Musk marked his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter by firing several top executives, including chief executive officer Parag Agrawal, chief financial officer Ned Segal and chief legal and policy officer Vijay Gadde. The head of Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, Boring Company also fired the board of directors of the company he bought and appointed himself the sole member of this board. True, he later tweeted that the dissolution of the council was “just temporary” in nature.

But, according to rumors, Musk is not going to be limited to these personnel decisions. And there are reports in the press that the new owner, who named himself CEO, will lay off 25% of the workforce, or almost 2,000 Twitter employees (according to regulations, the company had more than 7,000 employees at the end of 2021).

Large-scale staff reductions, as noted by the media, are being prepared as part of a new restructuring of the company.

In fact, reports that Elon Musk planned to cut a significant portion of Twitter’s staff have been circulating for several weeks now. The Washington Post previously reported that Musk told potential investors that he plans to cut almost 75% of his workforce to pay off his debt burden. Later, however, the billionaire denied these claims, telling employees that he would not cut such a large part of the staff.

And last Saturday, The New York Times reported that Musk had ordered job cuts at the company, with some departments being cut more than others. It was also claimed that the layoffs would take place before November 1, when employees were supposed to receive share grants as partial compensation. “This is a lie,” Musk reacted to these messages.

Even before Elon Musk began his bid to buy Twitter this April, the social media company was struggling economically and had “significantly slowed down recruitment” by July amid a broader economic slowdown in the tech industry. And as The Guardian recalls, even then it was expected that the company would lay off about 25% of its staff – regardless of its takeover by Musk.

A climate of uncertainty has surrounded Twitter and its staff ever since Musk got involved in the buying spree earlier this year — first by offering to buy it and then by trying to pull out of the deal amid accusations by Twitter of underreporting bots and spam accounts. on your platform. And already against this unsteady background in recent months, many employees considered it good to leave the company. In the end, the billionaire, after months of legal wrangling, decided to close the deal, formalizing the purchase last week and immediately starting a major overhaul of his acquisition.

While Twitter employees think about their future, the new management seems to be preparing some surprises for users of the social network. Discussed in particular is the idea of ​​requiring account holders to pay for the “blue tick” that is given to celebrities, politicians, business leaders and journalists as a token of confirmation of higher-status accounts. Musk himself, commenting on this initiative, spoke briefly: “Interesting.”

At first, there was speculation in the press that Twitter would charge up to $19.99 a month for account verification services. But then the new owner of the company himself said: “We need to pay the bills somehow! Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. How about $8?”

But if all of the above is “about money”, then we should not forget about the political trail that trails behind the story around Musk and Twitter. On the same day that the head of SpaceX bought Twitter, Saudi billionaire Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal announced that he was rolling over his shares by $1.9 billion, making him the largest shareholder of the company after Musk.

And as Sky News notes, the move has raised concerns among some US politicians, including Democratic US Senator Chris Murphy, who has asked the Committee on Foreign Investment to investigate the national security implications of Saudi investment in Twitter for the United States. “We should be concerned that the Saudis, who are clearly interested in suppressing political speech and influencing US policy, are currently the second largest owners of a major social media platform,” the senator tweeted.

Many politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are also concerned about Elon Musk’s plans to “fix” Twitter and cut some of the platform’s content restrictions in the name of promoting free speech. Although the billionaire himself shortly after buying the company announced that no major decisions on content or the recovery of suspended accounts would be made until a “content moderation board” with various points of view was created. But Musk later elaborated on that statement, writing that “anyone suspended for minor and dubious reasons will be released from Twitter jail.” Against this backdrop, speculation is taking hold that Donald Trump may be allowed to return to the microblogging platform. As you know, the former US president was permanently banned from his Twitter account shortly after his supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

European politicians fighting for freedom of expression took hostility Elon Musk as an “absolutist of freedom of speech.”

Musk has made no secret of the fact that he considers Twitter a “public town square” where all speech, no matter how divisive or questionable, should be allowed. In March, he said that failure to do so could even “undermine democracy.” Musk is also known to have expressed concern over the decision by European officials to ban the websites of Russian state media such as RT after the outbreak of the conflict in Ukraine.

From Brussels, the new owner of Twitter is openly hinted that he will face some of the toughest online moderation rules in the world, from which the EU is not going to deviate. Last week, the EU’s official set of rules included the Digital Services Act, which allows authorities to order digital companies to remove illegal content based on EU and national law, and requires platforms to verify content flagged by users.

And as Politico notes in this regard, “Whatever Musk has in mind for Twitter, for him coming as his boss will be a stress test for content moderation policy in the EU: it is one thing to develop rules for a safer Internet; and another thing is to ensure their observance.”