Leaked internal communications by Twitter employees about the awakened employees reveal despair and anger over Elon Musk’s month-long efforts to acquire Twitter.
Musk announced will buy The company for $44 billion on Monday. The deal concludes a month-long saga that began when Musk first tweeted opinion polls and his thoughts on the decline of free speech on Twitter.
Leaked messages on business communications platform Slack reveal that some Twitter employees have shouted out against the new owner.
A site reliability engineer who identifies as a non-binary and intersex person wrote: “It’s physically embarrassing watching Elon talk about freedom of speech.”
“We all go through the five stages of grief in cycles and everyone’s nerves are confused,” wrote a senior software engineer who called Musk a “hole,” and tried to comfort his colleagues. “We’re all spinning our wheels, coming up with worst-case scenarios (Trump back! No more moderation!). The truth is that [Musk] He hasn’t spoken about what he plans to do in any detail outside of broad sweeping statements that can easily be seen as a hyperbolic show sport.”
A senior video engineer announced to employees that he would be resigning, “Not the place to say it, but I won’t work for this company after the acquisition.”
Follow back and forth between several employees angry at the newsSome have warned that their connections can be searched on Slack. The employees then transferred their conversations to their personal devices using the Signal encrypted chat app.
Twitter’s leadership appears to be predicting internal backlash and potential sabotage when it shut down the ability of its employees to make changes to the platform until Friday.
In the lead-up to Monday’s deal, Twitter employees have been breathing for weeks on Slack about Musk and advocate for the platform’s implementation of moderation.
Reliability Engineering Manager Musk Opinions On freedom of speech” is a cover for “I want not to be held accountable for saying or exaggerating harmful things.” “
Another engineer wrote that “sometimes self-reported censorship is just awful for people who are around and then find it.”[ing] out.” One senior content strategist replied, “And that just doesn’t happen often enough.”
This chief content analyst, who worked as a left-wing political activist outside of Twitter, led many of the conversations that were highly critical of Musk.
“Sometimes I think it can’t be as bad as I imagine. Then I see something like that and I’m all ‘No, it’s going to be worse,'” I wrote in response to Musk’s tweet last week.
But not all employees kept their opinions in internal business conversations. Some of the strongest comments against Musk have been publicly posted on employee Twitter accounts.
Addison Hoenstein, Software Engineer, tweeted: “You asked me why buying El*nM*sk 9.2% of Tw*tter and getting a seat on the board is bad and I explain why that wasn’t his ultimate goal and things will definitely get worse and potentially dangerous for Democracy and Global Affairs”.
Jay Holler, an engineering director, tweeted multiple times earlier in the month when it was announced that Musk could take a leadership role. “The problem with elonmusk is that he has consistently exhibited a pattern of harmful behavior that disproportionately affects marginalized people, so maybe let’s not give him any more power than what he actually stole?” Holler later tweeted, “I’m tough now.”
Conor CampbellD., a non-binary front-end engineer, responded directly to Musk on Tuesday defending Twitter’s censorship of the Washington Post for its reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop shortly before the 2020 presidential election.
Twitter had a policy on hacked documents. We applied this policy on an equal footing,” Campbell claimed. The contents of the laptop were not hacked, as both the Washington Post and The Times acknowledged. Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said it was “complete errorAt a congressional hearing last year.
Laura GomezTwitter, which used to lead the localization of Twitter sites, tweeted: “AM*sk owned Twitter is one of the biggest threats to the 2022 and 2024 elections. We are excited if this happens.”
Separately on Slack, several Twitter employees have repeatedly belittled this journalist for posting screenshots of their colleagues’ publicly available tweets. They discussed ways in which they believed his tweets could be a violation of Twitter’s policies.
“How is that [Ngo] Check hole? A software engineer asked for a senior staff member. Several staffers used expletives to refer to this journalist before admitting that the tweets did not violate their rules. They suggested to each other to remove references to Twitter employment in their Twitter bios.
Although many of Slack’s internal comments were personally critical of Musk and his views, a few employees weren’t angry and some were dismissed.
“I don’t know much about him, I don’t really care. I just wish it was freedom of expression [the] Top priority. I don’t care who drives it. “Especially for minorities like me, I had absolutely no rights in my home country,” said a woman in the design department.
Another software engineer wrote, “I think our policies are clearly biased (everyone has a bias) and I would personally like to see more balance. I support you if Musk is the right person to do this but the idea of someone being less biased towards the things we are actually biased toward is something love it “.
“Beer fan. Travel specialist. Amateur alcohol scholar. Bacon trailblazer. Music fanatic.”