In less than a month Twitter has gone from a relatively viable, if not currently profitable, company with 7500ish employees to, allegedly, less than 1000 this morning after entire swathes of teams have been fired or quit.
It's sad to see something that has been such an institution in the last 10 years crumbling so quickly.
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Now, first, a disclaimer - I definitely do not think Elon Musk has done a good job here. In my opinion he made many bad decisions in quick succession, and has alienated all of his best (ex)-members of staff. The industry won't forget it in a hurry.
However - Twitter was already in trouble - The sheer levels of toxicity and abuse that some individuals have received, the sheer amount of fake bot traffic that was never quite addressed. The terrible, and sometimes quite despicable, manipulative "promoted" tweets.
It's admirable to have a system that celebrated free speech quite as much as Twitter did, but the flip side of that is that without proper moderation, you always get a small number of people determined to spread hate and lies because they no there's no real way for them to be held accountable.
If I were to create a "new" twitter, I would say each individual should be verified. Every single one.
Corporate accounts would also need verification, and a team of verified individuals could be assigned access to tweet as that account.
If you have a bot to do some automated stuff, like the many excellent Twitter bots do, then they too should be 'signed and authorised' like a corporate account, and those people are completely responsible for the bot's tweets, as if it were their own.
Any abuse or inappropriate messages - press the abuse button and that message would instantly be suspended in limbo, pending someone checking it.
But then if everyone was verified I suspect the abuse levels would be a lot lower.
What do you think? If we were building a new Twitter - what features would you have, and what existing features would you choose to leave out?
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