Twitter has now come under fire from activists for laying off thousands of its employees. While the company is facing a lawsuit for this and former CEO Jack Dorsey is blaming himself for mass layoffs, Elon Musk said he had no choice because the company is losing $4 million daily. According to Yoel Roth, the mass layoffs have also impacted his department, and approximately 15% of the Trust and Safety department had to leave their roles. While Roth argues that the front-line moderation staff has experienced the least impact, NBC News says the company has fired the employees who were responsible for fighting misinformation on the platform. The report continues that even the engineers who dealt with safety issues have now left the company. The midterm election is on the way, and it still needs to be made clear how Twitter wants to battle fake news and misinformation while firing its key employees. Twitter was already targeted by a coordinated trolling campaign that wanted to make users think the company had changed its content moderation policies.
Twitter talks of election integrity amid mass layoffs
Roth added that the company had restricted access to its internal tools for security reasons. However, most of the 2,000+ content moderators who are working at the front-line review were not reportedly impacted, and they will regain full access in the coming days. The Twitter executives also asserted that the recent layoffs had not impacted the company content moderation volume. Activists, civil rights organizations and NAACP are blaming Twitter for wide layoffs. These organizations are even calling the advertisers to stop working with Twitter because the company owner Elon Musk has reportedly undermined his promise to keep Twitter’s election protection policies. However, Musk claims, “Twitter’s strong commitment to content moderation remains absolutely unchanged.”
