Simon Balmain, a laid-off senior community manager at Twitter, discusses the impact of Elon Musk's sweeping layoffs on the platform's trust and safety operations.
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…”
Opinion
Jack Dorsey was an active participant in Elon Musk's Twitter takeover
“Jack is, is certainly not an innocent bystander in, in this turn of events. He's, you know, a very active participant in this turn of events even having not been at the company for, you know, a year and not been on the board since I think May is when he steppe…”
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 …”