Elon Musk’s great purge inside Twitter.

When Twitter is under the control of Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, people and users are asking a question. What is happening to Twitter?

Elon Musk's Twitter account

Twitter officially belongs to Musk on October 28 after completing a $44 billion bid in April, making him the newest boss of the most influential social media platform. After that “Shark Tank” deal, Musk posted a video on Twitter of him entering the quarter happily while carrying a kitchen sink with the caption “Entering Twitter HQ - Let that sink in!”

It’s not random that Musk carried the kitchen sink into Twitter’s headquarters. It’s a literary metaphor. According to Financial Times, the kitchen sink in business means solving a company’s problems like debt, falling profit, and higher costs in one go. Beyond that, this is the message that Musk wants to send to the employees and the director board: Musk is the chief now and will do anything to make Twitter his own, even if he has to fire everyone. In this sense, Elon had a very strategic "kitchen sink" when making a series of rather drastic decisions to change Twitter’s blood.

On the first day of being “Chief Twit,” according to CNBC, Musk fired Twitter’s CEO, Parag Agrawal; chief financial officer, Ned Segal; policy, legal, and trust leader, Vijaya Gadde, and dissolved Twitter’s board of directors. Then, the company began to fire 3,700 Twitter employees, equal to 50% of the workforce, to save money. Musk tweeted that the layoff is necessary when Twitter loses revenue of $4 million daily. And the whole layoff process is through email “Your role at Twitter” sending out.

Musk's great purge raised outrage among former employees and other people. A lawsuit against Twitter has been filed by former employees that accused the company violated worker protection laws under the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act as well as the California WARN Act, which requires 60 days of advance notice.

In front of the lawsuit and the pressure from the public, Musk has no choice but to give laid-off employees three months of severance, which is 50% higher than what is required by the law, as he said on Twitter.

What happens to Twitter right now concerns many people. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, wrote a letter to Musk urging him to adhere to some basic human rights principles and hoping Musk put them at the center of management under his leadership.

Everything that Musk has done with Twitter, from firing employees to changing this social media platform, heads toward the goal of freedom of speech. But Musk did it in the wrong way. He doesn’t understand that Twitter has become one of the most influential social media platforms because of the effort and development of every talented employee. Musk could have listened to them on how to innovate Twitter or what is best for this social media. Instead of keeping them, he fired them. Instead of maintaining Twitter the way it is, he purged it.

Ironically, since Musk fired employees, Twitter has become a minefield of hate because no one censors all inappropriate tweets. By October 31, there were 26,228 tweets and retweets containing racial slurs, 21,903 tweets and retweets containing homophobia, 2,598 tweets and retweets containing anti-Semitism, and many other hateful tweets, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

It is noticeable that Musk doesn’t know what to do or have a specific plan with Twitter or even understand how it is being operated. All Musk wanted was to purchase Twitter with $44 billion to save “the future of civilization” when he claimed that there was “great danger that social media will splinter into far right wing and far left-wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society.”

Musk is so successful with Tesla and SpaceX, making him the wealthiest man in the world. But when Chief Twit took over Twitter, he was caught between the problem of money and social responsibility. It can be said that what he needs to focus on right now is to save the company’s revenue and his wallet after purchasing the platform at a considerable price.

Firing people resonating with sudden changes in the company cannot help him solve any problem right now because Twitter is a platform that connects and divides the entire society at the same time. With his commitment to free speech, which is good, Musk has unblocked all accounts and controversial phrases, leaving Twitter in the early days of the "Chief Twit" era flooded with racially and religiously divisive messages.

When the need to be connected on social media is as essential as breathing, the fact that someone monopolizes control of social media needs to be considered. However, Musk's somewhat authoritarian leadership style with Twitter is not new, as other social network bosses have done the same so far. They created a great-expectation social media platform on the internet, invited people in, and reminded the users, “I am the owner now.”