Elon Musk has defended sacking half of Twitter’s 8,000 workers, saying “unfortunately, there is no choice”.
Mr Musk insisted that the platform’s commitment to moderation remained “absolutely unchanged”.
He tweeted: “Regarding Twitter’s reduction in force, unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over $4m a day.
“Everyone exited was offered three months of severance, which is 50% more than legally required.”
Just minutes before Mr Musk’s tweets, Twitter head of safety and integrity Yoel Roth confirmed the layoffs had affected 50% of the company, including approximately 15% of the trust and safety department.
Frontline moderation staff had experienced “the least impact”, he added.
Mr Musk re-tweeted this, describing it as an “excellent summary”.
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The words were aimed at reassuring users worried that Mr Musk’s takeover and the job losses would gut the moderation and safety teams and render the platform lawless.
This is particularly important ahead of the US midterm elections, with Twitter having been blamed as a factor in the spread of dis-information and abuse.
Jessica González, co-chief executive of Free Press, said: “When you layoff reportedly 50% of your staff – including teams who are in charge of actually tracking, monitoring and enforcing content moderation and rules – that necessarily means that content moderation has changed.”
Entire teams eliminated
Several employees tweeted about losing their jobs, saying Twitter had eliminated teams focused on human rights and global conflicts, another team checking algorithms for bias in how tweets are amplified, and an engineering team devoted to making the platform more accessible for people with disabilities.
The…
Source : skynews
