Twitter: Musk defends deep cuts to company’s workforce
Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, has defended firing roughly half the staff by claiming that he had “no choice” because the company was losing more than $4 million (£3.5 million) each day.
Twitter’s head of safety and integrity, Yoel Roth, mentioned “about 50% reduction company-wide” in a tweet.
However, Mr. Musk insisted that the social media juggernaut’s dedication to content monitoring remained “completely unaltered.”
The largest individual in the world, Mr. Musk, acquired Twitter for $44 billion (£38.7 billion).
In his own tweet, the billionaire argued that everyone who lost their job had been given three months’ worth of severance compensation, “which is 50% more than legally required.”
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Thousands of Twitter employees across the globe were reportedly losing their jobs on Friday, prompting concerns about what would become of the staff members in charge of removing dangerous content.
Online safety organizations and activists have speculated that Mr. Musk may rescind the permanent Twitter bans imposed on controversial personalities like the former president Donald Trump and soften moderation measures.
Musk’s remarks on Friday, in which he attempted to attribute Twitter’s “huge loss in revenue” to “activist groups” that were “trying to kill free speech in America,” fueled these worries.
However, Mr. Roth later in the day acknowledged in a tweet thread that most of the more than 2,000 content moderators engaged in “front-line review” were unaffected.
Thousands of Twitter employees across the globe were reportedly losing their jobs on Friday, prompting concerns about what would become of the staff members in charge of removing dangerous content.
Online safety organizations and activists have speculated that Mr. Musk may rescind the permanent Twitter bans imposed on controversial personalities like the former president Donald Trump and soften moderation measures.
Musk’s remarks on Friday, in which he attempted to attribute Twitter’s “huge loss in revenue” to “activist groups” that were “trying to kill free speech in America,” fueled these worries.
However, Mr. Roth later in the day acknowledged in a tweet thread that most of the more than 2,000 content moderators engaged in “front-line review” were unaffected.
Around 15%, he claimed, were impacted by the “decrease in force.”
According to documents viewed by the BBC, it involves 784 employees in San Francisco, 106 in San Jose, and 93 in Los Angeles.
The widespread job layoffs were “sadly essential to safeguard the company’s success moving forward,” according to an internal email delivered to employees earlier on Friday.
Employees who had been logged out on work laptops and the chat app Slack confirmed it on Twitter.
In posts on the platform, many employees disclosed that they had been let go, creating an image of global layoffs that affected divisions ranging from marketing to engineering.
Employees in product development, content curation, and communications were among them.
According to a tweet from a former senior manager at the business, a team that concentrated on research into how Twitter employs algorithms — a problem that was a priority for Mr. Musk — was also fired. However, that was later refuted.
Volkswagen is one of the companies that has stopped investing in Twitter since Elon Musk acquired the social media platform. Currently, almost all of Twitter’s revenue comes from advertising. The largest automaker in Europe stated, “We are actively following the situation and will decide about further steps depending on its evolution.
General Mills, a food maker and owner of the Lucky Charms and Cheerios brands, followed suit on Thursday.
It stated that it intended to “review [its] marketing budget” and that it would continue to watch Twitter’s “new course”.
General Motors, Audi, the pharmaceutical behemoth Pfizer, and other companies have also suspended their paid advertising on the platform. Mr. Musk has been looking for ways to reduce expenses and profit from the platform in various ways. One of his ideas is to charge users a monthly subscription fee to be verified on the platform.
Additionally, he suggested that users who paid the $8 monthly fee would have their Tweets prioritized in replies, mentions, and searches. This proposal drew criticism from some users on Twitter who claimed that he was establishing a two-tier system that would favor those who were willing to pay.
On Thursday, employees of Twitter filed a class action lawsuit that
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