Elon Musk says “Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue” due to advertisers leaving the platform

Elon Musk has spoken out about “massive” drops in revenue on Twitter, following multiple advertisers leaving the platform during his first full week as CEO.

Musk comments follow multiple brands, including General Mills and Volkswagen Group, pausing their ads on the social network as multiple civil society organisations have voiced their concerns about the direction Twitter is headed in.

“Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue due to activist groups pressuring advertising,” Musk tweeted today (November 4). “Even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists.” He added: “Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America.”

Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists.

Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 4, 2022

Organisations including the Anti-Defamation League, Free Press and GLAAD, continued to campaign for more brands to stop advertising on Twitter, citing massive layoffs taking place right before US elections, making election integrity policies less unenforceable.

Last week (October 28) Musk completed his takeover of Twitter Inc, becoming the platform’s new owner and instantly firing numerous top executives at the company including CEO Parag Agrawal, chief financial officer Ned Segal and legal affairs and policy chief Vijaya Gadde.

Earlier today, nearly half of Twitter’s 7,500 employees were let go in a massive layoff. According to The Verge, the areas of Twitter most impacted by Musk’s cuts include its product trust and safety, policy, communications, tweet curation, ethical AI, data science, research, machine learning, social good, accessibility, and core engineering teams.

Despite a reported lawsuit being filed against those plans, emails notifying staff that they would be losing their jobs were sent out earlier today.

In the first week of Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter, he’s been told to “fuck off” by Kathy Burke over plans to charge a monthly fee for verification and has seen hate speech balloon on across the social media platform.

The post Elon Musk says “Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue” due to advertisers leaving the platform appeared first on NME.