Twitter takeover: 1 year later, X struggles with misinformation, advertising and usage decline

BY BARBARA ORTUTAY

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — One year ago, billionaire and new owner Elon Musk walked into Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters with a white bathroom sink and a grin, fired its CEO and other top executives and began transforming the social media platform into what is now known as X.

X looks and feels something like Twitter, but the more time you spend on it the clearer it becomes that it’s merely an approximation. Musk has dismantled core features of what made Twitter, Twitter — its name and blue bird logo, its verification system, its Trust and Safety advisory group. Not to mention content moderation and hate speech enforcement.

He also fired, laid off or lost the majority of its workforce — engineers who keep the site running, moderators who keep it from being overrun with hate, executives in charge of making rules and enforcing them.

The result, long-term