Twitter's new owner Elon Musk is further gutting the teams that battle misinformation on the social media platform as outsourced moderators learned over the weekend they were out of a job.
Twitter and other big social media firms have relied heavily
on contractors to track hate and enforce rules against harmful content.
But many of those content watchdogs have now headed out the
door, first when Twitter fired much of its full-time workforce by email on
November 4 and now as it moves to eliminate an untold number of contract jobs.
Melissa Ingle, who worked at Twitter as a contractor for
more than a year, was one of a number of contractors who said they were
terminated Saturday. She said she's concerned that there's going to be an
increase in abuse on Twitter with the number of workers leaving.
“I love the platform and I really enjoyed working at the
company and trying to make it better. And I'm just really fearful of what's
going to slip through the cracks,” she said Sunday.
Ingle, a data scientist, said she worked on the data and
monitoring arm of Twitter's civic integrity team. Her job involved writing
algorithms to find political misinformation on the platform in countries such
as the US, Brazil, Japan, Argentina, and elsewhere.
Ingle said she was “pretty sure I was done for” when she
couldn't access her work email Saturday. The notification from the contracting
company she'd been hired by came two hours later.
“I'll just be putting my resumes out there and talking to
people," she said. “I have two children. And I'm worried about being able
to give them a nice Christmas, you know, and just mundane things like that,
that are important. I just think it's particularly heartless to do this at this
time.”
Content-moderation expert Sarah Roberts, an associate
professor at the University of California, Los Angeles who worked as a staff
researcher at Twitter earlier this year, said she believes at least 3,000
contract workers were fired Saturday night.
Twitter hasn't said how many contract workers it cut. The
company hasn't responded to media requests for information since Musk took
over.
At Twitter's San Francisco headquarters and other offices,
contract workers wore green badges while full-time workers wore blue badges.
Contractors did a number of jobs to help keep Twitter running, including
engineering and marketing, Roberts said. But it was the huge force of
contracted moderators that was “mission critical” to the platform, said
Roberts.
Cutting them will have a “tangible impact on the experience
of the platform,” she said.
Musk promised to loosen speech restrictions when he took
over Twitter. But in the early days after Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion
in late October and dismissed its board of directors and top executives, the
billionaire Tesla CEO sought to assure civil rights groups and advertisers that
the platform could continue tamping down hate and hate-fueled violence.
That message was reiterated by Twitter's then-head of
content moderation, Yoel Roth, who tweeted that the November 4 layoffs only
affected “15 percent of our Trust & Safety organisation (as opposed to
approximately 50 percent cuts company-wide), with our front-line moderation
staff experiencing the least impact."
Roth has since resigned from the company, joining an exodus
of high-level leaders who were tasked with privacy protection, cybersecurity
and complying with regulations.