Musketeers heading for the exits: chaos at Twitter

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Hello, and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist in New York. I'm John Fassman. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. A popular party doing well in a country's municipal elections is no surprise. But if a party wins every single municipality, as Nicaragua's ruling party did earlier this month, one might begin to wonder if something other than just popularity is in play. And it can be disconcerting reading what someone else thought of you. Hannah Pick Goslar found it so when she read entries from her friend's diary. The friend was Anne Frank. Our obituary's editor tells Hannah's story. First up, though, Elon Musk works hard. As well as running electric carmaker Tesla and space rocket firm SpaceX alongside several other ventures. He's also now in charge of Twitter, which he bought late last month. I mean, I'm really working at the absolute most amount that I can work from morning till night, seven days a week. So this is not something I'd recommend, frankly. Yet that sort of commitment is what he appears to be demanding from Twitter's remaining employees. He's reportedly given staff a deadline of 5pm today to commit to being extremely hardcore and and working long hours at high intensity or leave the company. But under his leadership so far, the platform has lurched from one Crisis to the next.

Twitter under Elon Musk has been total chaos.

Tom Wainwright is our technology and media editor.

He arrived and he pretty quickly sacked half the staff. New policy announcements were made by tweet and then often unannounced, shortly after being announced. And they've been making some big changes to the products, some of which have been full of bug, not worked. They've had to do U turns. So the whole thing has been very, very difficult, I think, for both people working there and people who use the platform.

So take us through some of those big changes. What's he been up to during his time in charge?

Probably the biggest policy change was a change on Twitter's verification system. So if you use it, you'll be familiar with this. Some accounts have this blue check mark which signifies that they're a notable person. And Elon Musk had always been against this. He described it as being like a lords and peasants system, where the elite were given this check mark and everybody el. And so he opened it up and his plan was that people could get themselves a check mark as long as they paid $8 a month. And the idea was that as well as the check mark, they'd get benefits, including seeing fewer ads and that kind of thing. And some kind of subscription like that for Twitter maybe had some potential. But the trouble was the execution was very, very chaotic. And you quickly saw people paying their $8 to get this check mark and then impersonate all kinds of famous people or companies because they weren't being verified at all. And cases like an account claiming to be Nintendo of America tweeting a picture of Mario sticking up his middle finger. Or you had an account pretending to be Eli Lilly, which is a pharmaceutical company, tweeting that it was going to be making insulin free from then on. And the real company then saw a big dip in its share price. And this is disastrous for a company that relies on advertising because advertisers, needless to say, are protective of their brands. And as soon as they saw all this chaotic stuff happening, a lot of them paused their ad spending.

And so that's on the front end. What about in the office itself? How's it been handling staffing?

I think it's been pretty rough. I mean, half the staff have been sacked. And I think reducing headcount probably was not a bad idea. I think it was an overstaffed company when you looked at the number of people working there relative to the size of the company. But doing it all in one go with apparently not all that much. Planning has been just a crazy way of doing it. Already he reportedly has been having to reach out to some people who were fired, asking them if they can come back. And the lack of some people working on particular project has meant that more bugs have appeared on the app. For example, Two Factor authentication seemed not to be working for some people recently, and you've seen some quite senior people have quit from some quite important teams. He's been making various other demands as well. He demanded that everybody come back to working in the office. My understanding was that previously Twitter, as Silicon Valley companies went, was pretty flexible about people working from home. But he ended that policy with almost no notice. People have been complaining that the free lunches have been stopped. And the latest was that yesterday he sends an email round to all staff asking everybody to recommit to working under what he called long hours and at high intensity in an extremely hardcore way. And they have a deadline of the end of today to sign up for that or else face getting three months severance.

So, Tom, what do you think the potential consequences are for the platform of all this management chaos?

Well, I think one thing that's been a bit worrying, people are concerned about is moderation on the platform and the safety of people using it. And one of the people who's quit was the former head of Safety and Integrity. They've laid off a lot of contractors reportedly as well, who've been working on content moderation. And Musk has tweeted that he wants to set up a content moderation council to adjudicate on what should stay up and what should be taken off. And Facebook has done something like that. And Facebook has something it calls the oversight board, which takes those decisions. I think that's a pretty good idea. But there's no sign of it yet. And it's not the kind of thing that can be set up overnight. So I think a lot of people are worried about moderation being done badly. And that could mean either kind of bad extremist stuff staying up, or it could mean the opposite, mean too much stuff being taken down. Because if you haven't got enough people to review these decisions, then the safe thing to do is to take stuff down and then take a long time to review whether it should go up. So I think bad moderation could go either way. And on top of that, there are worries about whether Twitter, having lost all these staff, could be in danger of breaching some of its obligations to regulators.

Tell us more about that. What sorts of regulatory questions are there?

Well, some of the people who've quit include people who were responsible for things like information security, privacy and compliance. And Twitter does have some, some legal obligations in these areas. The ftc, the Federal Trade Commission, has said that it's watching with deep concern and it's reminded Elon Musk that he's not above the law. And if Twitter breaks some of these rules, then it can get expensive. For example, in May it was fined $150 million for previously having sold users data. So it's got to keep these obligations. And the more of these senior executives it either sacks or loses, one would think, the greater the risk that it may end up dropping the ball at some point.

So where does all of this leave the company and more importantly, its users?

I think Twitter's in trouble. I mean, it's losing money. Elon Musk himself has said that it's losing $4 million a day, and he warned employees that bankruptcy was a possibility. And the more this chaos goes on, I think the bigger the risk that they're going to repel advertisers. Some have already paused their spending.

And then we also recently had a lot of difficulty with activist groups pressuring major advertisers to stop spending money on Twitter. This is despite us doing everything possible to appease them and to make it clear that moderation rules and hateful contact rules have not changed and we're continuing to enforce them. A number of major advertisers have stopped spending on Twitter.

Actually, I was speaking to the head of a rival social network who mentioned that they are already reaching out to companies that are big advertisers on Twitter to try and tempt them to reallocate their advertising budgets. And at the moment, I think ad spending on Twitter has just been paused rather than shifted permanently. But the longer this chaos goes on, the bigger the risk for Twitter that companies are going to move their ad budgets in a permanent way. And there are various alternative apps out there doing Twitter esque things. People are talking about ones like Mastodon, for example. But these little upstarts are, I think, probably not in a position to take on a huge number of Twitter users. They're finding it very difficult to scale up. And so I think more likely the ones to watch as possible beneficiaries of this would be the bigger, more established networks. So whether that's Facebook or Instagram, WhatsApp, TikTok, LinkedIn, all of these, I think they're the ones who possibly could stand to benefit. And in terms of what this all means, I mean, Twitter's not a huge network. In terms of users, it's only about a tenth the size of Facebook. So it's not massive business. But I think it matters because it plays quite an important role in the way that news is spread and the way that opinions are shaped. And it's a very popular network among opinion formers, whether that's politicians or think tank people or journalists. And so I think if it goes or if it changes in a big way, then it could have a bigger impact than the relatively small size of the business might suggest. For now, it seems there's no sign of all this drama ending, and it seems that the best place to follow it all is on Twitter itself.

All right, thanks so much for stopping by, Tom.

Thanks, John.

As the results in Nicaragua's municipal elections came in last week, a farce unfolded. The ruling party won 153 out of 100 municipalities. And under President Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua has become a one party state, some would say a one family state.

The family that runs Nicaragua is made up of President Daniel Ortega, who's a former Marxist guerrilla, and his wife and Vice president Rosario Murillo.

Ana Lancas writes about Latin America for the Economist.

They've transformed the state into a family business, essentially. So the ruling couple have nine children, and eight of those have posts in government or help run public companies.

How did Daniel Ortega first come to power?

So Ortega first became president in 1979 after taking part in a revolution against the last of the Somozas, which was a kleptocratic dynasty with American backing that ruled Nicaragua for 43 years. And basically the first 10 years that he was in power in Nicaragua was in a civil war with a US Backed Paralyzer military group called the Contras. Ortega lost an election in 1990 and stepped down. But then he was voted back into power in 2007, and he has vowed not to lose it again.

What has he been doing to stay in office?

So when he regained the presidency, he cozied up to businessmen. He won over the Catholic Church with one of the world's strictest abortion bans. And he also got really generous aid from Venezuela, which at the time had an oil boom. And the proceeds from that went to banks and firms owned by the ruling party, which then spent the cash on social projects and on Ortega supporters, free from legislative oversight. And so the Nicaraguan economy grew on average 5% a year between 2010 and 2017. And the number of people living on less than $3.20 a day fell from 27% in 2005 to 10% by 2017. So potential critics were silenced or bought off. And with that done, Ortega basically took over all branches of the state. So the Supreme Court is widely considered to be under his control. And it abolished term limits and expelled the leader of the opposition from Congress and 16 of his supporters. In 2016, Ortega made his wife the vice president. And so today, the state is run entirely by the family. But more recently, the regime has become bloodier and more brazen.

How so?

So when students and pensioners peacefully protested against the government in 2018, police in Sandinista goons killed over 350 people. And then last year, before a general election where Ortega won a fourth consecutive term, all seven opposition presidential candidates were locked up. So right now you have around 219 students, journalists, human rights defenders, all sorts of political dissidents behind bars in Nicaragua. And many of those are in El Chipote, which is a torture prison. In Managua, the capital, Hugo Torres, a former revolutionary commander turned critic of the regime, actually died in February after being denied medical help. Many prisoners are in solitary confinement. Some have been starved. And the ruling couple have now also turned on the Catholic Church because it was one of the last independent institutions that could criticize the government. So in this past six months, the government has locked up 11 priests who denounced human rights abuses. It's expelled nuns. And at least 2,000 NGOs and 50 independent media outlets have been shut down in the crackdown since 2018.

And talk us through, if you would, what happened in the most recent municipal elections.

So in the week of the municipal elections, some 31 people were arrested, according to UR Najaviertas, which is a civil society group. And it also reckons that over 80% of Nicaraguans didn't actually vote. Instead, Nicaraguans are voting with their feet. So in a recent survey by Gallup, more than half of Nicaraguans said that they wanted to emigrate. And this year, US border officials said that there were over 160,000 encounters with Nicaraguans at the border, most of whom were allowed to seek asylum. Remittances now account for 15% of GDP, which is higher than they have in the last few decades. Still, a loyal Ortega congressman with Fredo Navarro celebrated the results. He says US Nicaraguans, who are fulfilling our civic duty and our patriotic duty, are turning a deaf ear to the preachers of disaster who are calling for the disarticulation of a process that they won't be able to stop because it's a process for the benefit of all Nicaraguans.

And what has been the international response to the Ortega regime.

So so far, Ortega has appeared impervious to pressure. The US and the European Union have sanctioned several members of the ruling family as well as dozens of their cronies. And just recently, in October, Joe Biden's administration announced new sanctions on the gold industry, which exported almost a billion dollars worth of the metal last year. And meanwhile, the regime can't rely so heavily on fellow aut that once supported it because Venezuela and Cuba, for example, are cash strapped and Russia and China are dealing with their own problems. Colombia's new leftist president, Gustavo Petro, was rumored to be hoping to mediate, but nothing seems to have come of it. I spoke to one expert who just put it this way. He said that the dictatorial couple are perfectly content to be as isolated as North Korea in order to maintain their rule.

Will they be able to do that, do you think? Will they be able to maintain their hold on power?

So there is talk of freezing Nicaragua out of the Central American Free Trade Agreement with the United States, but they still have a couple of lifelines. So, for example, inexplicably, the Central American bank for Economic Integration, which is based in Honduras, has lent more than a billion dollars to Nicaragua since 2018. For context, that's more than all the aid it gave El Salvador and Guatemala combined. But the Ortegas may bring about their own downfall. Nicaraguans resent the wife of Daniel Ortega, Rosario Murillo, and her ostentatious wasting of their hard earned cash. Plus, she's not someone the military takes very seriously. So one person I spoke to told me that the weak link will be in the transition from Ortega to his wife. And it seems that the Ortegas have forgotten a lesson from their own revolution, which is that despotic dynasties don't last forever.

All right, Ana, thanks very much for joining us today.

Thank you, John.

In the summer of 1942, Hannah Goslar's mother began to think about making strawberry jam. And so she sent her daughter Hannah round to the Franks house, two doors away to borrow the scales and some packets of pectin to make the jam set.

Ann Rowe is the Economist's obituary's editor.

They had been next door neighbors for a long time and Hannah and Anne Frank, the daughter of the house, were firm friends. So she went to the house and rang the bell. There was no answer. She rang and rang again and eventually the lodger, Mr. Goodschmidt, came to the door, very nervous and jumpy. The German occupiers of Amsterdam were at the time trying to round up all the Jews in the city and send them to the death camps. He snapped at Hannah, what are you doing here? And she asked where the Franks were. He said, haven't you heard? They've all gone to Switzerland. Anne was always the center of attention and Hannah was very different. She was eight months older. She was very, very shy herself. And she also came from a much more religious household than the Franks. She was not allowed to eat there in the evenings because the Frank's kitchen was not kosher. Anne wanted to be famous. Hannah, by contrast, really wanted to hide away. But even after Anne's death in 1945, Hannah found herself not exactly living in her shadow, but certainly promoting the fame of Anne, who with her diary had become perhaps the most famous civilian victim of the Second World War. The attraction between these two had been instant. On the first day Hannah went to nursery, she noticed this little girl standing by the musical bells. And the minute she turned around, they flew into each other's arms. She would watch her in school breaks, scribbling in notebooks which she kept from the eyes of other people. And eventually, when the diary turned up, Hannah was rather shocked to read what Anne had written in it about her. Apparently, Hannah was a bit on the strange side. Hannah felt these remarks were not very nice, but she also tried to laugh them off. What was more disconcerting about them was that the diary had revealed that her friend, as she thought she was, was much more mature, much more perceptive in a way also crueler than the girl she thought she'd known. And as is the way with teenage girls, they rather fell out with each other. They got new best friends, and by the time she went on the jam making errand, Hannah was no longer Anne's best friend. There was somebody else in her place. But even though they had lost touch, they still kept on imagining each other. Hannah would think of Anne in Switzerland, as she supposed she was, and imagine that she was up in the Alps sipping hot chocolate and in love with a handsome boy. And meanwhile, Anne Frank, who was not in Switzerland, who was actually hiding in the back of her father's warehouse, had really very disturbing dreams about Hannah coming to see her because she supposed that this friend, who she'd lost touch with, had been rounded up by the Germans and taken to a camp. And in the diary, Anne prayed and prayed that somehow she might be able to save Hannah from the fate that was awaiting her. In fact, it was the reverse that happened. Hannah was rounded up in June 1943 and the Goslar family was sent to a transit camp and then to Bergen Belsen. But these were not the worst of the camps. In fact, they were rather privileged prisoners because her father had managed to get special papers which meant they would be exchanged for German prisoners of war and sent to Palestine. So they were treated much better than prisoners who went to the worst of the concentration camps. Their heads were not shaved, they were not tattooed, and they could meet each other and they could keep the things that they'd brought from home. And in the last winter of the war, suddenly about a thousand prisoners from Auschwitz arrived in Bergen Belsen. The camp became extremely crowded. They had to sleep two to a bed. And the camp was also divided by a barbed wire fence stuffed with straw between the two halves, with the Auschwitz prisoners on one side and the existing prisoners kept on the other one. At night, when the guards were not watching too closely, people would go up to the fence and whisper through it and see if they could make contact with those on the other side. And in the end she decided to do that herself and called very nervously into the darkness. Hello? Is anyone there? And a Dutch woman answered her, a woman who had actually been a neighbour of theirs, who knew that Hannah was calling for her friend Anne to see if she was there. And in fact she was. And so, extraordinarily, the two girls met again at the fence in Bergen Belsen. She could barely recognize her voice because it was weak with illness, and at first the two girls just cried. And Anna explained that she was very cold and hungry and told Hannah how their hiding place had been discovered. They had never gone to Switzerland. Hannah said she would get food if she could. She went back to her barrack and there again, as a matter of privilege, she had a Red Cross package which contained Swedish crisp bread. She got this and that together and a few socks and gloves and threw them over the fence to Anne. But then she heard a scream because, in fact another woman had caught the package. So Hannah made up another packet, threw that one over, and that one she knew Anne managed to catch. The two girls never saw each other again. In later years, her life was extraordinarily full of the thought of Anne. She carried her with her, she said, everywhere. And the shelves of Hannah's Jerusalem flat were full of books about Anne in many languages, but she had probably never been quite so close to her, and they had never been such best friends as that awful time when they had managed to meet at the fence in Bergen Belsen.

Ann Rohana Pittgaslar, who has died, age 93. That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. Let us know what you think of the show. You can get in touch@podcastseconomis.com and you can subscribe to the economist@economist.com intelligenceoffer the link is in the show Notes. We'll see you back here tomorrow.