What makes that explanation more likely than the other? Imagine there was no optics problem here, and it was just a highly publicized tweet of some internal comms with no PR consequences, it would still obviously need to be removed, right?

That's not obvious to me, no. What I'd imagine something like this being escalated, and that there would be reasonable cases to be made either way; that all internal information should be removed on principle, and that removing this tweet would harm the company without improving it's security posture. Twitter has historically been pretty reluctant to remove tweets, so I wouldn't be surprised if, under normal circumstances, they ended up keeping it up. But I wouldn't be surprised the other way either.

But closing our eyes to the optics of the situation would be a mistake. These are not normal circumstances by a long shot. Given the turmoil Twitter is going through and the heavy handed approach the new management is employing, it seems likely to me that very little work is being done through the normal channels (who's to say there's even someone on the other side of that channel?), while much is being done by direct instruction from the new management.

Isn't it more likely that organizational inertia is the culprit? Elon doesn't have the capability to change the day-to-day activities of 7,500 people following established policies and procedures in the amount of time that he's had the authority to do so.

There are some coarse-grained things that he can do, like fire the the top execs. The idea that he can strategize and effect change at the fine-grained level of emergent phenomena like a picture of an internal comms channel is bonkers, conspiracy theory stuff. He's got to lay off half the company to begin to even get some kind of handle on all of the machinations going on outside of his team's review.

I'm not suggesting he orchestrated a conspiracy, or even personally ordered that this tweet be removed, who knows, it could easily be someone else on his team, but the new management sure does seem to be able to change the day to day activities, given that they've laid many people off and eliminated the entire data science team. Why wouldn't they be able to say, remove this specific tweet, or perhaps, investigate this tweet for violations of our policy? That's not a conspiracy, that's what a company is.

> eliminated the entire data science team.

That was completely fake news indspired by a comedian calling himself "Rahul Ligma [Balls]"

On cursory inspection I'm not finding the articles I saw on HN about this, so I'm assuming you're right. My bad; thank you for calling it out. I'm barely over the time to edit my post, or I would remove that part.

> The idea that he can strategize and effect change at the fine-grained level of emergent phenomena like a picture of an internal comms channel is bonkers, conspiracy theory stuff.

You're right, but Elon himself is pushing this narrative. Remember when he pretended he was going to personally review the code of a bunch of Twitter engineers? There's also the Twitter blue pricing exchange and a number of other topics he's trying to appear deeply involved in the details for.

Draining the swamp is another way to put it.