Twitter in San Francisco. The social media company has fired thousands of workers and contractors, including many involved in determining whether material on the site violated the site’s policies or violated US or foreign laws.
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Twitter in San Francisco. The social media company has fired thousands of workers and contractors, including many involved in determining whether material on the site violated the site’s policies or violated US or foreign laws.
David Odisho/Getty Images
Twitter saw a fresh exodus of employees on Thursday after the company met a deadline set by billionaire owner Elon Musk for remaining staff to commit to being “extremely strong” or leave the company.
Outgoing employees tweeted under the hashtag #LoveWhereYouWorked, announcing that it was their last day on the social network. Twitter has been wracked by chaos since Musk finalized its $44 billion acquisition in late October. Many accompanied their posts with a greeting emoji, which has become a symbol within Twitter of respect for those leaving.
Musk already laid off half of the company’s 7,500 full-time employees on Nov. 4, reportedly cut thousands of contractors last weekend and fired several employees who had publicly criticized him.
On Wednesday, in an email to staff titled “A Fork in the Road,” Musk said Twitter “would have to be incredibly strong” to succeed. Those who chose to stay must expect long and intense working hours. Those who left would receive three months’ severance pay, he wrote. Employees were asked to choose by Thursday afternoon.
The new wave of departures is adding to fears that Twitter is losing critical expertise in everything from how the site and its servers operate to how it keeps user data secure and compliant with regulations on how how it handles toxic and illegal content.
Earlier Thursday, a group of Democratic senators sent an open letter to the Federal Trade Commission demanding an investigation of Twitter. They said they were concerned the company could violate the terms of an agreement with the agency stemming from previous privacy violations.
Musk “has taken alarming steps that have undermined the integrity and security of the platform,” the senators wrote.
The former worker warns that the 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 was a data scientist on Twitter’s civic integrity team, monitoring the platform for tweets that might violate its rules against fraudulent election claims. But she was a contractor, not a Twitter employee. When the cuts happened, she didn’t even know who was left to sign her time sheet.
“My boss got fired and my boss’s boss — the head of the department — resigned. So I didn’t know who my boss was. I didn’t know what my new job was,” she said.
With the end of voting fast approaching, Ingle and her team worked overtime to publicize the fake and breached tweets. She says she thinks they did a good job, given the circumstances.
“But at the same time, we’re not really sure if the work we’re doing matters to the new ownership.”
On Saturday, she got an 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 window that said you’ve logged out of one or more systems,” Ingle recalled.
Rapid change disrupts Twitter’s business
Musk’s rapid changes risk compromising Twitter’s ability to deal with toxic content and are already disrupting its business, Ingle and others warn, as chaos spreading across the platform threatens its ad revenue.
“There’s a short-sighted view of platforms that can look at trust and security work and integrity work as a cost center and as people who are trying to drag the company down instead of actually trying to help the company grow. long,” said Jeff Allen, a former Facebook data scientist who co-founded the Integrity Institute, a group focused on online trust and security.
At Twitter, like other major social media companies, this work relies heavily on people.
There are staffers who set policy, workers like Ingle who develop automated systems to analyze the 37.5 million tweets posted every hour, and most importantly, a large group of content moderators who constantly review posts. They are almost entirely contractors.
Many of these workers have now been fired or resigned. The first round of cuts cut 15% of Twitter’s employee trust and safety, according to Yoel Roth, who headed the division. Two days after the election, Roth resigned.
The initial round of layoffs also eliminated Twitter’s entire curation team of about 150 people. They played an important role by adding context and descriptions to trending news and events on the platform, and curating collections of tweets from authoritative sources to help address misleading or false claims.
It is unclear how many of the contractors eliminated last weekend were content moderators. Twitter did not respond to questions about the details of the job cuts.
But losing some of that workforce would be a blow. Ingle said their work is critical to improving the algorithms she wrote and understanding things computers can’t do, like sarcasm and parody.
Automated systems “need constant input and updating and testing and tweaking, just like any other computer script would…If there aren’t enough people to update the algorithms, they become increasingly porous, she said. “Automation is a lofty goal, and it’s a big goal. But we’re not there yet.”
Global implications
Reducing content moderation could also land Musk in hot water with European regulators. German law, for example, requires social networks to quickly remove illegal content or face fines.
“You either have content moderation, or you don’t,” said Sarah Roberts, a professor of information studies at UCLA who worked briefly at Twitter earlier this year. “You don’t just have some kind of content moderation. Removing child sexual exploitation material is content moderation.”
Ingle is also worried about the implications around the world as major events unfold, from the World Cup, which starts on Saturday, to elections around the globe.
“We’re fixated on the US for the US election, but we’ve dealt with the recent Brazilian election and we’ve dealt with elections all over the world: Japan, India, the EU, the UK,” she said. “If this global decline on Twitter happens, it will undoubtedly affect democracies around the world.”
A still from a video posted on Elon Musk’s Twitter account on October 26, 2022 shows himself holding a sink as he enters Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco.
-/Elon Musk’s Twitter account/AFP
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-/Elon Musk’s Twitter account/AFP
A still from a video posted on Elon Musk’s Twitter account on October 26, 2022 shows himself holding a sink as he enters Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco.
-/Elon Musk’s Twitter account/AFP
The upheaval since Musk took over is already evident on Twitter.
Musk himself tweeted a conspiracy theory. Hate speech increased in the days after the deal closed. Accounts that consistently share false claims are getting more engagement, according to NewsGuard, which rates the credibility of online news sources.
Her analysis found that while those accounts only tweeted 6% more in the week after Musk took over, they experienced a 57% increase in likes and retweets over the same period.
“The types of content they were putting out had disproportionately more misinformation than they usually had, and that’s what drives engagement,” said NewsGuard co-CEO Gordon Crovitz.
Musk’s first major product change — allowing users to buy so-called blue checks, which previously indicated that high-profile users were who they claimed to be — sparked a flood of accounts impersonating companies, celebrities and politicians. .
White nationalists and far-right extremists also signed up for the sweeps, according to a review of the accounts by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Twitter’s trust and security team had warned about the potential for the feature to be abused before its release in an internal document first reported by Platformer and seen by NPR.
This included “impersonating world leaders, advertisers, brand partners, election officials and other high-profile individuals.” The document warned that “motivated fraudsters/bad actors” would likely be willing to pay for the increased visibility provided by blue checks.
The team recommended ways to mitigate the risk, most of which were not adopted, according to notes in the document.
The blue check debacle worsened Twitter’s business woes as more advertisers stopped spending. Roberts says it’s no wonder big brands are wary — and not just about their messages appearing next to toxic tweets.
“They’re concerned about the association with Twitter itself as a brand,” she said.
Amidst the chaos, Twitter stopped serving the blue paycheck. Musk said he would reboot after Thanksgiving, with some guardrails.
