On Friday, four days before the midterm elections, Elon Musk started firing hundreds of Twitter employees, including important members of the teams responsible for managing U.S. elections and content moderation on the well-known social media network.
Employees used the hashtags #LoveWhereYouWork and #OneTeam extensively in their tweets on Friday to inform others that they had been fired. A large portion of persons who responded to the postings had prior experience in fields such as public policy, communication, engineering, marketing, and human resources.
The internet mogul who acquired Twitter last week has vowed to uphold the company’s content moderation and anti-fake news standards while also attempting to appease advertisers who were wary of his promises to bring back more unrestricted content to the news stream.
The layoffs on Friday, however, seem to be escalating users’ and advertisers’ concerns that Twitter is losing the ability to monitor who and what appears on its platform. In response to Friday’s mass layoffs, a coalition of human rights and activist organisations under the banner of #StopToxicTwitter called for a global halt to advertising.
On the call, Jessica González, co-CEO of the media advocacy group Free Press, stated, “With today’s huge layoffs, it’s evident that Musk’s actions betray his words.” She spoke with Musk earlier this week together with representatives from seven human rights and policy organisations. Musk gave them his word that he wouldn’t reinstate banned accounts for a few weeks and would unfreeze the tools used by Twitter employees to monitor election integrity.
In a tweet, Musk acknowledged that the site had already experienced a “huge reduction” in ad revenue and angrily retaliated against Twitter’s critics by accusing them of “trying to kill free expression in America.”
Musk has not yet made any public tweets acknowledging the Friday’s significant layoffs. An inquiry for comment was not immediately answered by Twitter spokespersons.
Michele Austin, the organization’s former director of public policy and elections in the United States and Canada, was one of the people let go.
Austin said on Twitter that she was in charge of assisting with the platform’s midterm elections policy in the US in 2022. She tweeted on Friday, “I was in charge of social impact efforts in both nations.
According to a former employee who talked to AWN under the condition of anonymity, several former workers were denied access to business logins for online Twitter accounts on Thursday night without having been previously informed that their contracts had been terminated. Even before the formal layoffs had been revealed, several users tweeted their unsuccessful attempts to enter into their Twitter email accounts.
The person said, “I woke up this morning to find I couldn’t access my work computer, work email, or my Slack account.” At that time, not even managers knew who was still on their teams, so I received a text from my manager asking whether I still had access.
The person added that the new management had “brought in some engineers from Tesla and some investors and friends of his” to replace some of the reportedly 4,000 people who had already lost their jobs at Twitter. The person also added that the new leadership had “justified” the firings in the name of “cost cutting.”
A class-action lawsuit against Twitter has been filed by disgruntled employees in the US who allege they were not given enough notice before their layoff. There are regulations requiring employers to give employees a lot of notice before terminating their employment in states like California and New York.
It might be challenging for Musk to fire local staff in Europe due to similar stringent labour rules in nations like Belgium, the United Kingdom, and France. This could be expensive as well.
The [stupidest] action ever is getting rid of public policy experts while you’re claiming to practise “true free expression,” commented Audrey Herblin-Stoop, Twitter’s former lead lobbyist in France, on the website.
