Twitter Inc. fired half of its employees on Friday, but the team in charge of stopping the spread of false information said the cuts were smaller. This is because advertisers stopped spending money on Twitter because they were worried about how it moderated content.
Staff at the social media company said on Twitter that teams in charge of communications, content curation, human rights, machine learning ethics, and some product and engineering teams were wiped out.
The move comes after a week of chaos and uncertainty about the future of the company under its new owner, the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. Musk tweeted on Friday that the service was seeing a “massive drop in revenue” because advertisers were leaving.
Musk said that the losses were caused by a group of civil rights groups that have been pressuring Twitter’s top advertisers to take action if he doesn’t protect content moderation. These worries grew as Tuesday’s congressional elections could be very important.
After the layoffs, the groups said they were going to put more pressure on brands and demand that they pull all of their ads from Twitter around the world.
Musk tweeted that the layoffs were necessary because the company was losing more than $4 million a day. He also said that everyone who was let go was offered three months of severance pay.
The company didn’t say anything about how many people would be laid off until late in the day, when the head of safety and integrity, Yoel Roth, tweeted that internal plans seen by Reuters earlier in the week showed that about 3,700 people, or half of the staff, would be laid off.
According to documents filed with California’s employment authority, 784 workers at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco and 199 in San Jose and Los Angeles were let go.
Roth said that the cuts affected about 15% of his team, which is in charge of stopping the spread of false information and other harmful content. However, the company’s “core moderation capabilities” stayed the same, he said.
Last week, Musk backed the head of safety, citing his “high integrity,” after Roth was called out for tweets he sent years ago that were critical of former President Donald Trump.
Musk has said that he will bring back free speech and stop Twitter from becoming a “hellscape.”
On Friday, President Joe Biden said that Musk had bought Twitter, a social media site that spreads lies all over the world.
“And now, what should we all be worried about? Elon Musk goes out and buys a company that spreads lies all over the world. There are no editors left in the United States. There’s no one who edits. How do we think kids will understand what’s at stake?”
Advertisers have been worried about Musk’s plan to take over for months.
Brands like General Motors Co. (GM.N) and General Mills Inc. (GIS.N) have said they have stopped advertising on Twitter until they know more about where the platform is going.
Musk wrote on Twitter that his team hadn’t changed anything about how they moderated content and that they had done “everything we could” to make the groups happy. Musk said at a conference for investors in New York on Friday that the pressure from activists was “an attack on the First Amendment.”
Twitter didn’t answer when asked for a comment.
LOSS OF ACCESS TO SYSTEMS
The email telling employees about layoffs was the first thing they heard from the company’s leaders since Musk took over last week. It was only signed by “Twitter.” Neither Musk nor any other executive was named.
Dozens of employees tweeted that they had lost access to work email and Slack channels overnight, but they didn’t get official layoff notices until Friday morning. This caused current and former employees to vent their frustrations on the platform they had built.
They showed their support for each other with blue hearts and salute emojis and the hashtags #OneTeam and #LovedWhereYouWorked, which is the past tense of a slogan that employees had used for years to celebrate the company’s work culture.
Employees wrote that Twitter’s curation team, whose job it was to “highlight and put in context the best events and stories that happen on Twitter,” had been fired.
An attorney named Shannon Raj Singh, who was Twitter’s acting head of human rights, tweeted that the company’s entire human rights team had been fired.
According to a tweet from a former senior manager at Twitter, another team that researched how Twitter used machine learning and algorithms was also cut. This was an important issue for Musk.
Senior executives said their goodbyes on Twitter on Friday. Vice President of Engineering Arnaud Weber said, “Twitter still has a lot of untapped potential, but I’m proud of what we did.”
Employees of Twitter Blue, a paid service that Musk is working to improve, were also fired. A former worker with the handle “SillyRobin” who said they had been fired quoted a previous tweet from Musk that said Twitter Blue would include “paywall bypass” for some publishers.
The worker said, “Just to be clear, he fired the team working on this.”
DOORS LOCKED
In an email to employees, Twitter said that offices would be closed temporarily and badge access would be turned off “to help make sure the safety of each employee, Twitter systems, and customer data.”
On Friday, it looked like no one was in the offices in London and Dublin. At the London office, everything that showed that Twitter had been there before was taken away.
Even though there was a sign telling people to stay away, a receptionist at Twitter’s San Francisco office said that a few people had come in and were working on the floors above.
Several Twitter employees filed a class action against the company on Thursday. They said the company was firing a lot of people without giving the required 60-day notice, which is against federal and California law.
The lawsuit asked the federal court in San Francisco to stop Twitter from asking employees who are being let go to sign documents without telling them about the lawsuit.