2023 begins at Twitter with a crisis of voluntary anemia. Part of the teams in the Trust & Safety department, in charge of international content moderation, have just been fired. A decision recorded on Friday January 6, 2023 and revealed by Bloomberg.
The Dublin and Singapore offices concerned
In detail, a dozen Twitter employees in Dublin and Singapore would have been thanked. Among them are Nur Azhar Bin Ayob, site integrity manager for the Asia-Pacific region, and Analuisa Dominguez, Twitter’s senior director of revenue policy. The layoffs would particularly concern the staff in charge of fake news on the social network.
For Ella Irwin, head of trust and safety at Twitter, this new haemorrhage is justified by the insufficient volume of certain sectors of the company. “It made more sense to consolidate the teams under one leader instead of two, for example”, she explained. Some sectors would have increased their workforce, she also assures.
Massive cuts since October
Since his acquisition of the social network in October 2022, Elon Musk has multiplied aggressive cost reductions, 5,000 of the 7,500 employees having left the company. A slaughter justified by the degraded financial situation of Twitter for several years, according to the multi-billionaire. “[Twitter était] like an airplane heading towards the ground at high speed, with engines on fire and controls not working”assured Elon Musk in December.
The massive layoffs of recent months had ended up worrying Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner for the Internal Market, about Twitter’s ability to comply with European laws. “The Commission services will carry out a stress test at Twitter’s headquarters in early 2023, which will allow the latter to assess its compliance even before the legal deadlines”he warned in November.
More recently, France seems to have obtained guarantees. “At Twitter headquarters, Elon Musk confirmed to me his intention to comply with European rules and his commitments on content moderation, the fight against disinformation and the protection of children”declared Jean-Noël Barrot, Minister Delegate in charge of the Digital Transition and Telecommunications after a meeting with the businessman, this Saturday, January 7.