The meta conversation has taken over Twitter in recent hours. And no, I don’t mean that there was a lot of news published about the Meta and/or the metaverse, I mean that the topic of conversation throughout the day and globally was the social network itself after the latest move. Elon Musk, who according to multiple sources has further decimated Twitter’s already shaky workforce after layoffs in recent weeks.

In case you know what happened, Twitter management (aka Musk himself) he sent an e-mail to all employees who still remained with the company. Partly it sounded like a motivational message, something very typical at this time, but it also required a level of total company commitment from the workers. Something that sounded like working overtime, giving up vacation, working more hours than the clock… in short, what is recently called crunching and what we, a little older, call labor exploitation.

Musk’s main move on this occasion was to include at the end of said report, a button that employees only had to press if they agreed to such a commitment. And yes, in response to the doubts raised by Twitter staff, the company published a list of answers to frequently asked questions in relation to this report, a list in which it was confirmed that not pressing the button would mean receiving two months’ salary, third-party compensation and, of course, dismissal.

Although there are still no official figures in this regard, the sources I mentioned at the beginning indicate that despite the poor employment situation in the sector, with layoffs from Facebook, Amazon and many other technology companies, there were many employees who chose not to accept the “challenge” presented by Musk and therefore join those who have already left Twitter after laying off half of its contract employees and around 80% of its subcontractors.

As a security measure to prevent the actions of former employees, Twitter has closed and will keep its offices closed until next Monday and in an attempt to save the day, Elon Musk would ask a few Tesla engineers to at least temporarily devote themselves to Twitter. Doesn’t sound like a particularly brilliant plan, but hey, we’ll have to wait and see how events unfold over the next few days and weeks.

In addition to hashtags dedicated to the death and farewell of Twitter, many of them in a comic tone but anticipating the end of the social network, we also saw several reports confirming that we must be prepared for the social network to fail at any moment. Not because of sabotage or anything like that, but because the strength of engineers and developers has been reduced enough that, according to this theory, they won’t be able to deal with all the problems that may arise in the bowels of the service.

Personally, I don’t think this is the end of TwitterI can’t say for sure because I don’t have it, but I think there is still room for them to survive. It now seems quite clear that it will have to overcome colossal downsizing, much of it essential, which will undoubtedly mean its decline. And we will have to see how both users and, crucially, advertisers, react to it.