After bringing Twitter become his business, Elon Musk carried out a series of policies, including the reduction of employees by almost 50%. Which team did Musk drop?
News of Twitter’s employee layoffs surfaced on Friday (04/11). Musk is cutting many teams that do important work at the company.
The same day Musk complained about alleged activists influencing Twitter ad revenue, he immediately cut several departments.
The move is believed to make advertisers even more worried about Musk’s ability to lead the company’s ships and crew.
Mas’ takeover of Twitter didn’t even last a week, but he didn’t expect it to bring a wave of mass layoffs.
Former Twitter employees who were laid off describe a somewhat chaotic situation, ranging from the company’s lack of communication with staff, to abrupt layoffs or their access to internal tools such as Slack or databases.
In the information vacuum created by Musk and deemed disorganized, some employees do not know if their colleagues are still at work or if their teams continue to exist.
The downsizing appears to be widespread and deep, affecting everything from Twitter’s trust and safety team that handles content moderation, to the marketing department.
Here is the list of teams that Musk eliminated outright:
Human rights
Former Twitter human rights adviser Shannon Raj Singh revealed that the company’s human rights team was terminated on Friday.
The team works to protect users facing human rights abuses around the world, including activists, journalists and people affected by conflicts such as the war in Ukraine.
Twitter’s former accessibility manager has confirmed that the company is downsizing the team, which improves products for people with disabilities. The team seems to still have a lot of work to do before going their separate ways.
Communication
It’s unclear which parts of Twitter’s communications team were directly cut, but the cuts are significant enough that many of the company’s top communications employees who have served for years have been affected.
Musk was seen as signaling a distaste for internal communications after taking over the company.
He gave Twitter employees little information about the changes, so it’s no surprise that the internal communications team was also affected, including the head of internal communications.
Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability
Musk disbanded a team known internally as META, highly respected for its exploratory work on AI ethics and algorithmic transparency.
A line of teams from directors to staff level was eventually eliminated along with team engineers and other members.
Public policy
US political journalism firm Politico reported that half of the company’s public policy team had been fired, including Michele Austin, a former director of public policy and elections in Canada and the United States who actively worked on the US by-elections.
The cuts allegedly included members of the Twitter team working to verify the accounts of political figures, according to reports Technological crisis.
Job cuts have no effect
Despite the removal of employees in various divisions of Twitter, the policy claims to have no effect on the dynamics of content moderation.
The company’s head of security and integrity, Yoel Roth, said the content moderation that led the company’s frontline reviews was not spared.
“The daily volume of moderation measures taken remains stable,” Roth said.
He said he saw hate chatter this week fall below last week’s average. Moderation on Twitter has been of particular concern ahead of next week’s US by-elections. But the integrity of the election remains a “top priority,” Roth said.
“Once again, it becomes very clear, Twitter’s strong commitment to content moderation remains completely unchanged,” he said. The edge.
(can/lth)
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