Widespread Twitter layoffs begin a week after Musk takeover
Twitter began widespread layoffs Friday as new owner Elon Musk overhauls the social platform.
The San Francisco-based company told workers by email Thursday that they would learn Friday if they had been laid off. About half of the company’s staff of 7,500 was let go, Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of safety and integrity, confirmed in a tweet.
Musk tweeted late Friday that there was no choice but to cut the jobs “when the company is losing over $4M/day”. He did not provide details on the daily losses at the company and said employees who lost their jobs were offered three months’ pay as severance.
No other social media platform comes close to Twitter as a place where public agencies and other vital service providers — election boards, police departments, utilities, schools and news outlets — keep people reliably informed. Many fear Musk’s layoffs will gut it and render it lawless.
Roth said the company’s front-line moderation staff was the group the least impacted by the job cuts.
Musk, meanwhile, tweeted that “Twitter’s strong commitment to content moderation remains absolutely unchanged.”
But a Twitter employee who spoke with The Associated Press Friday said it will be a lot harder to get that work done starting next week after losing so many colleagues.
“This will impact our ability to provide support for elections, definitely,” said the employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concerns for job security.
The employee said there’s no “concrete sense of direction” except for what Musk says publicly on Twitter.
“I follow his tweets and they affect how we prioritise our work,” said the employee. “It’s a very healthy indicator of what to prioritise.”
Several employees who tweeted about losing their jobs said Twitter eliminated their entire teams, including one focused on human rights and global conflicts, another checking Twitter’s algorithms for bias in how tweets get amplified, and an engineering team devoted to making the social platform more accessible for people with disabilities.
Twitter’s employees have been expecting layoffs since Musk took the helm of the company. Already, he has fired top executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal, on his first day as Twitter’s owner.
Musk also had removed the company’s board of directors and installed himself as the sole board member. On Thursday night, many Twitter employees took to the platform to express support for each other, often simply tweeting blue heart emojis to signify Twitter’s blue bird logo, and salute emojis in replies to each other.
A class action lawsuit was filed Thursday in federal court in San Francisco on behalf of one employee who was laid off and three others who were locked out of their work accounts. It alleges that Twitter intends to lay off more employees and has violated the law by not providing the required notice.
The layoffs come at a tough time for social media companies, as advertisers are scaling back and newcomers – mainly TikTok – are threatening the older platforms like Twitter and Facebook.
Big companies including General Motors, General Mills and Audi have all paused ads on Twitter due to questions about how it will operate under Musk. Volkswagen Group said Friday it is recommending its brands, which include Skoda, Seat, Cupra, Audi, Lamborghini, Bentley, Porsche and Ducati, pause paid activities until Twitter issues revised brand safety guidelines.
Musk has tried to appease advertisers, but they remain concerned about whether content moderation will remain as stringent and whether staying on Twitter might tarnish their brands.
Insider Intelligence analyst Jasmine Enberg said there is “little Musk can say to appease advertisers when he’s keeping the company in a constant state of uncertainty and turmoil, and appears indifferent to Twitter employees and the law”.
“Musk needs advertisers more than they need him,” she said. “Pulling ads from Twitter is a quick and painless decision for most brands.”
AP