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(Trends Wide) — Elon Musk said Friday that Twitter suffered a “considerable drop in revenue,” for which he blamed “activist groups that put pressure on advertisers.” Musk, the new owner of the social media platform, did not comment on the mass layoffs at the company that took place on Friday.
“Twitter has suffered a significant drop in revenue due to activist groups putting pressure on advertisers, although nothing has changed in terms of content moderation and we did our best to appease activists,” he said in a tweet. “Extremely wrong! They are trying to destroy free speech in America.”
The comments come after several major advertisers halted their Twitter campaigns after Musk completed his $44 billion purchase of the platform last week. The acquisition was followed by reports of an increase in racist comments and hate speech on the platform.
General Mills, General Motors and Audi, among others, withdrew their campaigns on the social platform.
layoffs in the company
Twitter began layoffs of employees across the company on Friday, following an internal memo sent out the day before warning that cuts would be forthcoming.
Between Thursday night and Friday morning, dozens of Twitter employees began posting on the platform that they had already been blocked from company email accounts even before the layoffs were announced. Some also shared blue hearts and greeting emojis indicating that they were still with the company.
This Friday morning, employees from the curation, AI ethics, marketing and communication, search, public policy, wellness and other teams tweeted that they had been fired.
“I just remotely logged out of my work laptop and got kicked out of Slack,” said a Twitter employee on the platform. “It’s sad that it had to end this way.”
It is unclear how many employees have been or will be laid off. Twitter had around 7,500 employees before the Musk acquisition. In recent days, there have been reports that the cut could be between 25% and 50% of staff, as Musk is rethinking how the platform works and tries to improve the company’s results after obtaining significant debt financing. to finance its $44 billion acquisition.
Employees File Class Action Lawsuit
Several employees filed a class action lawsuit Thursday night alleging that Twitter is violating the federal and California Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN Act).
The WARN Act requires an employer with more than 100 employees to provide 60 days advance written notice before a mass layoff “affecting 50 or more employees at a single workplace.”
“Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has made it clear that he believes complying with federal labor laws is ‘trivial,'” attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan, who filed the lawsuit, said in a statement to Trends Wide. “We have filed this federal complaint to ensure that Twitter is accountable under our laws and to prevent Twitter employees from unknowingly giving up their rights.”
