Twitter in San Francisco. The social media company has laid off thousands of workers and contractors, including many involved in determining whether material on the site violates site policies or violates U.S. law. foreign or not.
David Odisho/Getty photo
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Twitter in San Francisco. The social media company has laid off thousands of workers and contractors, including many involved in determining whether material on the site violates site policies or violates U.S. law. foreign or not.
David Odisho/Getty photo
Twitter saw a new exodus of employees on Thursday as the company hit limit line set by billionaire boss Elon Musk so that the remaining employees commit to being “extremely hard” or leave the company.
Departure staff posted on Twitter under hashtags #LoveWhereYouWork, announced that it was their last day on the social network. Twitter has been in turmoil since Musk completed a $44 billion purchase at the end of October. Many people included a welcome emoji in their posts, which has become an icon on the internet. Twitter shows respect to those who are about to leave.
Musk laid off half of the company’s 7,500 full-time employees on November 4, reportedly cutting thousands of contractors last weekend, and lay off many employees who criticized him openly.
On Wednesday, in an email to employees titled “A fork in the road,” Musk said Twitter would “need to work incredibly hard” to succeed. Those who choose to stay will expect long and stressful working hours. Those who leave will receive three months of severance pay, he wrote. Staff were asked to pick on Thursday afternoon.
The wave of new departures adds to concerns that Twitter is losing key expertise on everything from how its website and servers work to how to keep user data and data safe. comply with regulations on how to handle harmful and illegal content.
Earlier on Thursday, a group of Democratic senators sent an open letter to the Federal Trade Commission urging an investigation of Twitter. They said they were concerned the company might breach the terms of the settlement with the agency stemming from past privacy violations.
The senators wrote that Musk “took alarming steps to undermine the integrity and safety of the platform.”
Former workers warn cuts will have consequences
When Musk fired half of Twitter’s employees just days before the midterm elections, Melissa Ingle was left in limbo.
She’s a data scientist on Twitter’s civic integrity team, monitoring the platform for tweets that may violate rules against misleading election statements. But she’s a contractor, not a Twitter employee. When the cuts happened, she didn’t even know who was left to sign her timesheet.
“My boss was fired, and my boss’s boss – the department head – also quit. So I don’t know who my boss is. I don’t know what new task I’ve been given,” she said.
with end of voting quickly reached, Ingle and her team worked overtime to flag false and offending tweets. She said she thought they did a great job, under the circumstances.
“But at the same time, we’re not really sure if the work we’re doing will matter to the new ownership.”
On Saturday, she got the answer: she no longer had a job at Twitter.
“I just found out that I was fired [because] I happened to look at my phone around 5:30 [P.M.]and I got a little pop-up saying you were signed out of one or more systems,” Ingle recalls.
Rapid changes disrupt Twitter’s business
Ingle and others warn that Musk’s rapid changes risk affecting Twitter’s ability to handle malicious content and have disrupt its businessas chaos spills over the platform threatening its ad revenue.
“Having a short-sighted view of platforms that can treat trusted and secure work as well as integrity work as a cost center and who are trying to drag the company down instead of actually trying trying to help the company grow in the long run,” said Jeff Allen, a former data scientist at Facebook and co-founder of the Integrity Institute, a group focused on online trust and safety.
At Twitter, like other mainstream social media companies, the job relies heavily on people.
There are employees who set policies, people like Ingle that develop automated systems to analyze 37.5 million tweets posted every hour, and most importantly, a large group of content moderators that constantly watch Review posts. They are almost entirely contractors.
Many of these workers have now been laid off or laid off. The first round of layoffs reduced Twitter’s trust and safety staff by 15%, by Yoel Roth, the department leader. Two days after the election, Roth quit his job.
The first round of layoffs also removed Twitter’s entire management team of about 150 people. They play a key role in adding context and description to trending news and events on the platform, and curate collections of tweets from authoritative sources to help. address misleading or untrue statements.
It’s unclear how many bidders were eliminated last weekend as content moderators. Twitter did not respond to questions about the details of the job cuts.
But losing part of that workforce would be a blow. Ingle says their work is crucial to improving the algorithms she’s written and to understanding things computers can’t, such as satire and mockery.
Automated systems “need constant input and updates, testing and adjustments, just like any other computer script needs… If there aren’t enough people to update the algorithms, they’ll die.” becomes more and more porous,” she said. “Automation is a noble goal, and it’s a great goal. But we’re not there yet.”
global meaning
Cutting back on content moderation could also hit Musk. European regulatory body. German lawfor example, asking social networks to quickly remove illegal content or face penalties.
“Either you have content moderation or you don’t have it,” said Sarah Roberts, a professor of information studies at UCLA who briefly worked at Twitter earlier this year. “You don’t just censor content. Removing child sexual exploitation material is content moderation.”
Ingle also worries about the worldwide implications as major events loom, from the World Cup, which kicks off on Saturday, to elections around the globe.
“In the US, we are very concerned with the US elections, but we handled the recent elections in Brazil and we handled the elections around the world: Japan,” she said. Japan, India, EU, UK”. “If this global decline of Twitter occurs, it will certainly affect democracies around the world.”
Screenshot from a video posted on Elon Musk’s Twitter account on October 26, 2022 showing him carrying a sink as he entered the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco.
-/Elon Musk’s Twitter account/AFP
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-/Elon Musk’s Twitter account/AFP
Screenshot from a video posted on Elon Musk’s Twitter account on October 26, 2022 showing him carrying a sink as he entered the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco.
-/Elon Musk’s Twitter account/AFP
The volatility since Musk took over has been evident on Twitter.
Musk himself tweeted a conspiracy theory. hate speech increased sharply in the days following the close of trading. Accounts that keep sharing false claims are receiving participate moreaccording to NewsGuard, which assesses the reliability of online news sources.
Its analysis found that while those accounts tweeted just 6% more in the week after Musk took control, their likes and retweets increased by 57% over the same period.
NewsGuard co-CEO Gordon Crovitz said: “The types of content they’re spreading are more misinformed than usual and that’s what drives engagement.”
Musk’s first major product change — allowing users to buy the so-called green checkpreviously pointed out that famous users are who they claim to be — created a series of accounts impersonating companies, celebrities and politicians.
White nationalists and far-right extremists have also signed up to receive checks, judging by the accounts of Southern Poverty Law Center.
Twitter’s safety and trust team warned about the possibility of this feature being abused before implementation in an internal document. first reported by Platformer and viewed by NPR.
That includes “impersonating world leaders, advertisers, brand partners, election officials, and other prominent individuals.” The document warns that “motivated scammers/bad guys” may be willing to pay to increase the visibility of blue checks.
The group proposed ways to mitigate the risks, most of which were not adopted, according to the note on the document.
The failure of the green check worsened Twitter’s business, as many advertisers stopped spending. Roberts says it’s no surprise that big brands are wary — and not just their messages appearing alongside malicious tweets.
“They are concerned about being associated with Twitter itself as a brand,” she said.
Amid the chaos, Twitter has halted the rollout of paid blue checks. Musk said it would run again after Thanksgiving, with some balcony.
