Mass layoffs swept though the company’s worldwide offices, including operations that police misinformation and malicious content.
Elon Musk began firing hundreds of Twitter employees on Friday, four days before the midterm elections, including key members of the teams that work on U.S. elections and content moderation on the high-profile social-media platform.
Tweets flooded the platform on Friday, many using the hashtags #LoveWhereYouWork and #OneTeam, as employees let others know that they had been let go. Many of those posting had previously worked in roles including public policy, trust and safety, communications, engineering, marketing and human resources.
Half of Twitter’s public policy team was cut, including members of a team handling verification of politicians’ accounts, according to a person close to the company who requested anonymity. That work will now be folded into a team rolling out a subscription service that is expected to launch on Nov. 7.
Since buying Twitter last week, the tech billionaire has insisted that the company’s content-moderation and disinformation policies remain in force, and has sought to placate advertisers who were skittish about his promises to restore more free-wheeling content to its news feed.
Friday’s layoffs, however, appear to be adding fuel to the anxieties of both users and advertisers that Twitter is gutting its ability to keep tabs on who and what shows up on its platform. And the across-the-board cuts come just as the company’s moderation systems are expected to be tested during the midterms.
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Elon Musk began firing hundreds of Twitter employees today — four days before the midterms — including key members of the platform’s U.S. elections and content moderation teams.https://t.co/P23HKeefSB
— POLITICO (@politico) November 4, 2022
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