Elon Musk fires Twitter staffers globally
As Elon Musk reimagines the social network, a large number of Twitter employees—including those engaged in the company’s public policy and content-moderation activities—were let go on Friday.
Employees used the social media site to inform others of their termination in moving tweets, many of which used the hashtags #LoveWhereYouWork and #OneTeam. 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.
Damien Viel, who is in charge of the company’s operations in France, said on Twitter, “All my thoughts, respect, enthusiasm, and love to all tweeps throughout the globe today. “We created the world’s most amazing software together. Let’s take pride in all we’ve accomplished and how we did it.
According to a former employee who spoke to POLITICO on the condition of anonymity, several people who have so far lost their employment were prevented from using workplace logins for their Twitter accounts on Thursday night without being notified that their contracts had been ended.
The revelations come after an internal email that went out to the firm’s tens of thousands of workers globally on Thursday informing them that they would be notified via email on November 4 whether or not they would stay at the company. According to Bloomberg, there have been rumors that as much as half of Twitter’s worldwide workers would lose their jobs.
Employees at Twitter’s European offices in Dublin have characterized the situation as “carnage” and the layoffs as “random and indiscriminate” in interviews with the Irish Times. An ex-Twitter executive who is now based in the UK told POLITICO that employees were exchanging frantic WhatsApp messages with coworkers in an effort to find out who had been let go and who was still employed by the business.
On Twitter, there is a lot of “droom-scrolling” to see what is happening, the source told POLITICO on the condition of anonymity.
The machine learning, ethics, transparency, and accountability team at Twitter has been fully dissolved, according to a post by senior engineer Joan Deitchman on the site. The team’s duties included doing research on how to increase the openness of automated algorithms. That work is crucial to how regulators are attempting to govern social media today, especially the way that potentially hateful information is spread automatically around these sites.
“Everything is gone,” she said.
An inquiry for comment was not immediately answered by a Twitter spokeswoman.
To rule them all, one Musk
In accordance with U.S. federal law, disgruntled employees in the United States have filed a class-action lawsuit against Twitter, alleging inadequate notice of the termination of their employment agreement. It may be difficult — and expensive — for Musk to fire local staff in Europe due to strong labor rules in nations like Belgium.
“Removing public policy experts while you’re claiming to practice “genuine free speech” is the first step towards
