MONITORING DESK
CALIFORNIA: Elon Musk, the chief executive of the social media site Twitter, said that the number of new users signing up for the service is at an “all-time high” as he battled a mass exodus of advertisers and users moving to other platforms due to worries about verification and hate speech.
As of November 16, signups had increased by 66% since the same week in 2021, averaging over two million per day. Musk noted this in a tweet posted late on Saturday.
In addition, he stated that user active minutes had reached a record high, averaging nearly 8 billion minutes per day over the previous seven days as of November 15. A 30% increase over the same week in 2016.
Hate speech imitations were down as of November 13 when compared to October of the previous year.
According to Musk, the number of reported impersonations on the platform increased earlier this month, both before and after the launch of Twitter Blue.
The purchase of Twitter, according to Musk, who also owns the rocket company SpaceX, brain-chip startup Neuralink, and tunneling company the Boring Company, would advance his goal of building an “everything app” dubbed X.
According to the tweet, Musk’s “Twitter 2.0 The Everything App” will have functions like encrypted direct messages (DMs), long-form tweets, and payments. Twitter advertisers, including major corporations like General Motors, Mondelez International, and Volkswagen AG, have paused their campaigns as they adjust to the new CEO.
Musk said that Twitter was seeing a “huge decrease in revenue” as a result of the advertiser retreat and accused a coalition of civil rights organisations of exerting pressure on the platform’s top advertisers to threaten legal action if he did not defend content moderation.
Following Musk’s decision to lift the restriction on tweets from former US president Donald Trump, activists are urging Twitter’s advertisers to make public announcements about removing their advertisements from the social media site.
Following Musk’s ultimatum that staffers sign up for “long hours at high intensity” or leave, it is believed that hundreds of Twitter employees have left the struggling company.
The company reduced its workforce by half earlier in November, eliminating teams in charge of human rights, communications, content curation, machine learning ethics, and some product and engineering teams.
