Twitter has reportedly made more cuts into its already drastically diminished trust and safety team, which deals with global content moderation, as well as into the unit handling hate speech and harassment.
A US media outlet has cited unnamed sources as saying that at least a dozen additional cuts affected workers in the company’s Dublin and Singapore offices, among them Nur Azhar Bin Ayob, the head of site integrity for Twitter’s Asia-Pacific region, and Analuisa Dominguez, Twitter’s senior director of revenue policy.
The company’s head of trust and safety Ella Irwin has confirmed that several members of the teams were fired, but denied that the cuts targeted some of the areas mentioned by the media outlet.
“It made more sense to consolidate teams under one leader [instead of two] for example,” she pointed out in an emailed response to a request for comment.
The remarks came after Elon Musk was slammed for his efforts to shake up Twitter after buying it in late October, with the platform firing 3,700 people around the world, including top executives responsible for “content moderation”.
This included the firing of multiple top executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal, as well as Vijaya Gadde, the legal policy and content moderation chief who banned then-outgoing US President Donald Trump in January 2021, and about half of the company’s employees, including over 90 percent of staff in India.
Musk promised to make Twitter’s algorithms more transparent, and introduced a new $7.99 month verification system allowing users to get the famous blue check. This wreaked havoc, with hundreds of fake accounts created to post meme after dank meme, forcing the company to temporarily pause the program.