Elon Musk's Twitter has reportedly fired more Twitter employees from its already reduced trust and safety team, which is responsible for global content moderation and the regulation of hate speech and misinformation, as per Bloomberg's report.
Employees in the company's Dublin and Singapore headquarters were affected by at least a dozen layoffs on Friday, Jan. 7, according to anonymous sources who spoke to Bloomberg.
TOPSHOT - This video grab taken from a video posted on the Twitter account of billionaire Tesla chief Elon Musk on October 26, 2022 shows himself carrying a sink as he enters the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco. Elon Musk changed his Twitter profile to "Chief Twit" and posted video of himself walking into the social network's California headquarters carrying a sink, days before his contentious takeover of the company must be finalized.
Fresh Layoffs
The layoffs reportedly include Analuisa Dominguez, the app's senior director of revenue policy, and Nur Azhar Bin Ayob, the head of site integrity for Twitter's Asia-Pacific region.
Members of teams for Twitter's global appeals, state media, and misinformation policy were also cut off from their posts.
Ella Irwin, Twitter's head of trust and safety, told Bloomberg that certain team members had been let go but refuted some areas that were included by the anonymous sources.
She claimed that Twitter does get rid of positions in departments that did not generate enough traffic to warrant continued funding.
However, she mentioned that the social network has boosted employment in its appeals department and would keep a head of revenue policy and a head for the Asia-Pacific region for trust and safety.
In October, Musk paid $44 billion to acquire Twitter, partially funding the transaction with debt totaling about $13 billion and with interest payments of about $1.5 billion annually.
Since then, he has been remodeling the social networking site, which he claims is in danger of going out of business and was losing $4 million per day as of early November 2022.
Twitter's Efforts Against Misinformation
Over the years, Twitter has made progress in preventing the propagation of false information and hate speech on the platform. This is evident in the suspension of multiple individuals deemed as propagators of harmful speech and fake news.
For instance, during the 2020 elections, the platform fact-checked the majority of tweets from former US President Donald Trump.
Twitter stepped up its regulation of any political content that contains false information, despite concerns that it may be curtailing free speech.
Trump eventually received a permanent ban from the bird app when it claimed that his tweets during the January 2021 Capital riots had incited violence.
But Elon Musk took charge and established his absolutist stance on free speech. He later lifted the ban on Trump and other controversial figures after granting them a general amnesty.
Twitter's workforce has been significantly reduced after Musk laid off most of the company's board. Some of its workers left their posts when he imposed a "hardcore" working ultimatum.
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