Simon Balmain, a laid-off senior community manager at Twitter, discusses co-founder Jack Dorsey's role in Elon Musk's acquisition of the company.
Assertion Supported
Balmain lost laptop, Slack, and Gmail access an hour after layoff email
“Within the email kind of said, yeah, there's good, there's gonna be this huge reduction in, in head count. You will, if you're affected, you'll get an email to your personal email. And if not, you'll get something to your work email. And it was within an hour …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Twitter employees learned of internal company moves from reporters on Twitter
“On pretty much on platform, following the news, following, yeah, following, you know, following the resources of deep diving investigators like, you know, Casey Newtons and people like that. Yeah, we're finding out a lot of stuff at the same time everybody els…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Mass layoffs will degrade Twitter's manual, non-AI content moderation, Balmain warns
“Content moderation is, it's not AI driven, right? It's not machine learning. It's, you know, there's elements of that to it, like anything in tech, but it's a manual job that real people are doing. And if you're laying off people that do that, then stuff's not…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Balmain: Musk will likely make concessions to appease Twitter advertisers
“It's potentially quite likely that concessions will have to be made by him in order to, you know appease brand advertisers in, in certain ways that some of these people who were very jubilant and joyful about this might have a very quick turn of heart about th…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Twitter's direct user revenue will not offset falling advertising spend
“Not confident that a push on direct revenue products via users will pick up at the same pace that ad revenue may drop.”
Opinion
Balmain: Musk's firing of Twitter executives made sweeping layoffs clearly inevitable
“When I think the real mood shift came On the day that, you know, the deal was closed and he, you know, showed up at the office and fired all the executives. Right. You know, these are incredible people that, that, you know, most people in the company have had …”