It has lost it's position as the place to get bleeding edge news...
SAN FRANCISCO — A year ago this month, Elon Musk turned to his favorite social media site with a question. “Is Twitter dying?” he asked.
On the anniversary of his hostile takeover bid to buy the social media company, he may have his answer.
Twitter has been dramatically transformed under Musk and few — even among some in the billionaire’s corner — say the changes have been for the better. In recent weeks, government agencies, news organizations and powerful social media influencers have questioned the usefulness of the platform, with some major players publicly abandoning their accounts or telling users they can’t rely on it for urgent information.
Advertisers have fled in droves over Musk’s policy changes and erratic behavior on the site, causing advertising revenue to recently drop by as much as 75 percent, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive internal information. Rounds of layoffs have left Twitter operating with a skeleton staff of 1,500 — an 80 percent reduction — and so riddled with bugs and glitches that the site goes down for hours at a time. Meanwhile, the company’s valuation has cratered, Musk has said, to less than half the $44 billion he paid when he bought the company roughly six months ago.
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A previous Post analysis found Twitter was amplifying hate speech in its “For You” timeline, thanks in part to Musk’s decision to restore thousands of previously suspended accounts.
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A different change is threatening Twitter’s usefulness to the National Weather Service, which has long used automatic tweets to communicate urgent news about extreme weather to the public. Twitter users have had access to systems that allow them to push automated posts by connecting to external sources of information so that the Weather Service and meteorologists can send out quick posts when tornadoes or floods hit.
As weather conditions change, the agency relies on these automated posts to keep people up to date, sometimes sending dozens a day.
Twitter said last month it would limit automated tweets to 1,500 a month, and charge $100 per month for anyone who wanted to send up to 50,000. After the change takes effect, the Weather Service said, its automated tweets about severe weather “may not be posted.” Officials said Twitter told them no exceptions would be made to the new limits.
Twitter’s tweaks are already causing smaller issues for weather watchers: James Spann, chief meteorologist for ABC 33/40 in Birmingham, Ala., said Twitter integration with Slack is broken, a problem for him because he uses the chat tool to communicate with weather spotters on the ground. They would use the auto tweets to push storm warnings to the spotters.
“That’s really aggravating,” he said. “One day, we had a tornado event here and we had no warnings on the Slack channel.”
On Friday, the U.S. National Tsunami Warning Center tweeted it would also be affected by the automated tweet limit, adding “we will make every effort to continue manual posts.” San Francisco Bay Area transit system BART also tweeted Friday it would stop using its account for sharing alerts, although it later walked back its position saying some of its access to the site was restored.