What’s the Mood Inside Twitter?

Kate Conger, reporting for The New York Times:

Many Twitter employees feel personally invested in the company’s effort to encourage healthy conversation — even if they do not directly work on content moderation — and have pressed executives to crack down further on hate speech and misinformation, six employees said. They see Mr. Musk’s proposal to revert to Twitter’s early, lax approach as a rebuke of their work.

But other employees have argued in internal messages seen by The Times that their co-workers have shifted too far to the left side of the political spectrum, making employees who support Mr. Musk’s plans too uncomfortable to speak up. In a worker-run survey of nearly 200 Twitter employees on Blind, an anonymous workplace review app, 44 percent said they were neutral on Mr. Musk. Twenty-seven percent said they loved Mr. Musk, while 27 percent said they hated him.

Blind offers colleagues a way to — according to Blind — anonymously chat about and review their workplace, where only their fellow colleagues can see those internal-to-the-company discussion boards. They verify that participants actually work where they claim to work by requiring a work email address to sign up. Me, I wouldn’t trust this as far as I can throw it, and you can’t throw a website. I might sign up just to lurk, but I wouldn’t post a word that I wouldn’t say under my name. But that’s just me.

A poll of 200 Twitter employees — all of whom are on Blind — doesn’t prove anything, but that an evenly-split response is not what you’d expect based on the public comments from Twitter employees.

★ Saturday, 30 April 2022