live:the twitter meltdown

Members of a certain generation – aka elder millennials – have been here before, where we’ve invested in social platforms and then seen their slow demise. But unlike Tumblr, MySpace, and AOL im, and Vine, to name a few – Twitter holds the distinction of self-destructing in real time.

Headcount
Besides the 11,000 Twitter employees who were let go last week, contractors were also affected. CNBC is reporting:

• Twitter has ended roles for most of its contract workers without giving full-time employees who worked with them any advanced notice.
• Platformer reported that 4,400 out of 5,500 contractors at Twitter experienced job cuts.
• Employees told CNBC that they had no notice that their contractor peers would be dismissed or when, and said Twitter has also recently ended roles for all internal communications team.

Govt Troubles
In a recent conversation, someone mentioned you’ve got to have really screwed up for the FCC to be interested in what you’re doing. CNN is reporting (as of 11/11/22) that “Musk’s Twitter may have already violated its latest FTC consent order“.

Confusion
If you can’t join them, confuse the hell out of them! Listen, you don’t need an MBA to realize that if you lay off the entire PR team, engineers, and other people who keep the wheels turning at a company, without building an infrastructure – you’re going to mess things up as much as Musk has screwed this up. Public Relations and Comms professionals are the team who shape the narrative – they are the first line of defense.

RIP
One of my first experiences in journalism school was a mock press conference where we had to fact-check in the moment, and tweet in real-time. It wasn’t always a smooth process: there were social media managers whose roles were casualties of mis-tweeting; celebrations when Twitter permanently banned an ex-President; and yes, even where a certain Ukrainian keeps updates on her status in Kyiv.