Twitter’s Thanos snap: What will Musk do next?

In May, Elon Musk, while continuing to see-saw over his $44 billion Twitter deal (was it buyer’s remorse?), offered a three-step solution to avoid “manipulation” by the microblogging site. Alleging that the microblogging site’s users were being manipulated by its algorithm (Twitter was then being run by Parag Agrawal as CEO), he suggested that users should fix their feed by clicking “...on the home button, tap on the upper right of the screen and then click on the latest tweet option”. Twitter co-founder, Jack Dorsey, countered by explaining that the feature was designed to save time when someone is away from the app. “...pull to refresh goes back to reverse chron as well”, Dorsey tweeted 10 days later. Not that Dorsey’s explanation cut much ice with Musk. 

The deal has now been concluded, and Musk is in the driver’s seat as a self-crowned CEO. But the drama that ensued from his coronation, and which continues, has caught many people, including Twitter employees, off-guard, including the company’s Ethical AI team that handled the microblogging site’s algorithmic bias and transparency issues. 

The story so far reads like a movie script. Musk concluded the deal on 27 October. He steps into the office and sacks four senior executives, including CEO Agrawal, chief financial officer Ned Segal, and the legal and policy head Vijaya Gadde. He even sacked the company’s ‘Ethical AI’ team, and Rumman Chowdhury, director of the Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability (META) team at Twitter, who was also let go, compares Musk’s layoffs to the “thanos snap”, which refers to Thanos snapping his fingers to eliminate half of the universe’s population (Avengers: Infinity War). “Yep, the team is gone. The team that was researching and pushing for algorithmic transparency and algorithmic choice...”, tweeted Joan Deitchman @JoanDeitchman, whose status reads as “Former Sr Eng Manager @Twitter, ML Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability”. 

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