Observers fear that the 2022 FIFA World Cup will reveal the limits of Twitter under Elon Musk. With the layoff campaign affecting the company's employees and the unrestricted freedom of expression allowed on the site, observers expect frequent outages and a flood of hatred.

The new CEO of Tesla, who now heads the tweeting platform, confirmed on November 20 that it is necessary to "follow the World Cup on Twitter to get the best possible coverage" of the event. Meanwhile, observers and former employees of the site fear that this football festivity will deliver a severe blow to Twitter with an unprecedented wave of racist and hateful messages.

Elon Musk also faces a major challenge during the FIFA World Cup, which takes place between November 20 and December 18 in Qatar. It is one of the most followed events on social media, so it will be a test for the new Twitter, which recently underwent a large layoff campaign.

It is also noted that at the end of last October, just days before Elon Musk dismissed almost the entire communications team, Twitter management confirmed in a press release that football was the sport with the highest number of comments on Twitter, far ahead of basketball, American football, and baseball combined.

Twitter's credibility has become a gamble under Musk's management, especially for advertisers, as The Wall Street Journal confirms that the 2018 World Cup led to a 5% increase in advertising revenues over a full quarter.

Also, shortly before the opening match between the Qatari team and their Ecuadorian counterpart, Ella Irwin, Twitter’s Vice President and head of platform security, confirmed that everyone is working hard to ensure the smooth operation of the site and explained that "teams have been working for several weeks to have everything ready for the World Cup."

A former employee of the social network, who preferred to remain anonymous, said in an interview with the British newspaper The Guardian that under such circumstances, "there is a 50 percent chance that the Twitter platform will experience a major outage during the first two weeks" of the World Cup. The new general manager has let go of a third of the teams responsible for ensuring the site’s capacity to withstand the "shock" in the event of a large increase in user traffic, as usually happens in FIFA World Cup tournaments.

However, it seems that Musk’s promotion of an "absolute" concept of freedom of expression has worsened the situation, as Imran Ahmed, director of the Center for Combatting Digital Hate, told The Washington Post in an interview that this "signals to all racists in the world that Twitter is ready to welcome them."

Realizing that such a hostile and hate-filled atmosphere might accelerate advertisers leaving his platform, Musk was convinced that the situation needed to be calmed. On Friday, November 19, 2022, he confirmed that algorithms will not highlight hateful tweets.