troubles

ANTHONY ADKINS contributing columnist

Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter back in October 2022 shook the social media world to its core, attracting the attention of many of the platform’s users along with those who are purely looking in from the outside. In doing so, the many cracks within the world’s capitalistic and faux-meritocratic societal structure are shown.

According to the New York Times, Twitter’s workforce has reduced almost 50% of its staff, dropping the number of employees from around 7,500 to about 3,700. The vast majority of these layoffs took place within the last three to four months.

“It shows a form of tyranny,” Dr. Mohammed Ala-Uddin, a lecturer within JMU’s School of Communication Studies

(SCOM), said. “The public is helpless to the Big Fish in society.”

Ala-Uddin compared Twitter to a country like the U.S., where those given privileged positions in their lives and careers take on roles of leadership. They assume these roles and become “disruptive factors” within their spaces, he said.

“Any time you have change, it’s going to affect people.” Lindsay Harvell-Bowman, an associate SCOM professor.

According to a report from the New York Post, Musk’s layoffs were extended to Twitter’s global content moderation teams earlier this year. The company’s latest cost-cutting measures resulted in the removal of employee perks such as free meals in the office see TWITTER , page 26 from TWITTER, page 25

“People are aware of how they are being deprived,” Ala-Uddin said. “It’s like we’ve entered a new form of slavery, with workers being happy about being controlled in a not-so-obvious way.”

In the case of Twitter, Musk has no qualms with handling the removal of his engineers in person.

According to The Verge, Musk reportedly fired an employee following a meeting in which they discussed the waning performance of Musk’s tweets on the site. After conducting an investigation into any factors that point to why, the anonymous engineer found that the public had lost interest in what the new CEO had to say.

Upon hearing the reason, Musk fired the engineer immediately without explanation.

While it’s common for most companies in the U.S. to adhere to at-will employment practices — meaning employers can fire anyone for any reason without prior notice or consequence — in the case of mass layoffs, the terms change a bit. Affirmed by the U.S. Department of Labor, to be in accordance with the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, employers are required to provide staff with a 60 day notice in the event of a mass layoff of at least 500 employees.

Reuters reported that many of the laidoff employees were terminated upon Musk’s takeover of the company, meaning they could have received little-to-no warning. On top of this, they were promised severance pay after the merger. For many, this pay has been unsatisfactory or unseen. Earlier this year, a judge ruled against a classaction lawsuit filed by ex-employees on these grounds.

“Our pursuit of justice is put second in the way of these corporations,” AlaUddin said. “There’s an inherent flaw in our system of meritocracy and the open market.”

In lieu of Musk’s new-found ownership of Twitter, the lives of the many engineers and staff members that built the platform up to what it is today have been shaken by the hands of one man. Simply put — no one should have that much power or influence over so many others, especially not if the U.S. is considered to be the land of the free

CONTACT Anthony Adkins at adkinsal@ dukes.jmu.edu. For more editorials regarding the JMU and Harrisonburg communities, follow the opinion desk on Instagram and Twitter @Breeze_Opinion.