Bought out in October of last year by Elon Musk, the app many have known as Twitter has gone through many alterations including something as big as a name change. The sad thing is in only one year, X has already had some significant backlashes including on as large a scale as even continental unions begin to find and question X’s reliability and safety.
One of the first changes anyone ever would notice with the start of X is of course its name, but another trait people noticed was the changing of major policies. One of these would include the verification check mark put upon accounts that were confirmed to be legit now having to be paid for via a subscription. Even some major agencies including governmental ones were told they had to pay for verification, and if everyone already thought it ridiculous, it’s sad to say that Musk has added two more levels of checkmark subscriptions.
Along with this change in ownership and function, even inside the company itself, X began to see some less-than-positive reviews from staff. A great example is Ella Irwin, the X head of Trust and Safety has officially resigned. While she has not stated a reason for her departure, many have plenty of theories based on the direction X has been headed.
One of the most popular theories has to do with Musk removing or lightening discrimination and hate speech policies on the app, which caused so many problems that now the German Anti-Discrimination agency has declared they will be leaving the app altogether. It has even lost X many advertisers who do not want to be associated with the hateful speech that has become all too common.
Another possible reason can be found in a recent lawsuit where multiple employees of the company have begun to sue X for not giving out promised bonuses for 2022. The attorney representing the employees has claimed it could be “tens of millions of dollars” that X owes to their staff. On top of this financial slip-up, X is also being sued over unpaid rent and bills to other companies.
On the topic of some legal consequences following X’s establishment, Australia is even now fining X over not answering questions about child abuse content within their app. To be more specific they are fining X 610,500 Australian dollars, or $380,00 U.S dollars. The reason is Australia requires apps to report such info to be allowed within their nation, particularly wanting to know how the app is handling the policing of child exploitation and harm online.
X has not yet made any comments on this other than they are making some form of effort toward it, but internal reports show X has cut many safety and watchdog employees instead. X was not the only company contacted by Australia’s commissioner’s office due to the Online Safety Act requiring such research to be done, but the reason why X was fined out of all of them was on the form they were required to fill out X left multiple questions entirely blank.
Australia is not even the only nation, or union, to come to question X on its policies and actions when handling major issues. Following the online publication of the Isreal-Hama war, the European Commissioner for the Internal Market Thierry Brenton began to investigate how X was handling the issue. What researchers and investigators found was a large sum of misinformation, and false and questionable content that was not being policed whatsoever.
In response to this issue, the commissioner sent a letter to Musk’s office relating to the concerns they found, saying he must respond within 24 hours about the problem. Failure to do so, especially for a larger sum of time than provided could lead to the content being deemed illegal under European regulations and in fines equal to about 6% of the company’s revenue.
At the start of October, even news stations were bringing in experts to talk about what was going on within the company. Stanford’s Internet Observatory director Alex Stamos was one of those experts, formerly Facebook’s chief security officer, who talked about what he was noticing on CNBC. He described Musk’s actions as “cutting off the good guys, empowering the bad guys” while specifically talking about political disinformation plaguing the site.
It’s becoming rather clear that if changes aren’t made, or reversed, on X it will likely only continue to garner less support and more conflict. Whether it be lawsuits, fines, or lack of advertising, X is already far behind where they were when it started and even farther away from outdoing its past self. All anyone can do, for now, is sit back and see if the glass will fall out from underneath X, or if they will find a way to climb back up into public favor.
