Photo: The Canadian Press The Twitter logo is seen at the social media company’s headquarters in San Francisco on Friday, Nov. 11, 2022. (Stephen Lam/San Francisco Chronicle via AP) Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk is further cracking down on groups fighting misinformation on the social media platform, as outsourced moderators learned over the weekend that they were out of a job. Twitter and other major social media companies have relied heavily on contractors to monitor hate and other harmful content. But many of those content curators are now gone, first when Twitter fired much of its full-time workforce via email on Nov. 4, and now as it tries to eliminate an untold number of contract jobs. Melissa Ingle, who had worked at Twitter as a contractor for more than a year, was one of several contractors who said they were fired without notice on Saturday. He said he was concerned abuse on Twitter would increase with the number of employees leaving. “I love the platform and I really enjoyed working at the company and trying to make it better. And I’m really afraid of what will slip through the cracks,” he said on Sunday. Ingle, a data scientist, said she worked in the data and tracking department of Twitter’s social integrity team. Her work included writing algorithms to find political disinformation on the platform in countries such as the US, Brazil, Japan, Argentina and elsewhere. Ingle said she was “pretty sure I was done” when she couldn’t access her work email on Saturday. The notification from the contracting company he had been hired by came two hours later. “I’m just going to put my resumes out there and talk to people,” he said. “I’ve got two kids. And I’m worried about being able to give them a nice Christmas, you know, and just little things like that, they’re important. I just think it’s especially heartless to do it right now.” Content moderation expert Sarah Roberts, an associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, tweeted on Sunday that “about 3,000+ Twitter contractors were laid off last night.” Twitter has not said how many contract employees it cut. The company has disbanded its communications department and has not responded to media requests for information since Musk took over. Contractors also do other jobs to help keep Twitter running, “All contractors are not content moderation agents,” Roberts said. “Contractors fulfill many key roles within the company. But almost all supervisory agents are contractors.” In the first days after Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in late October and fired its board and top executives, Tesla’s billionaire CEO sought to reassure civil rights groups and advertisers that the platform could continue to fight hatred. That message was echoed by Twitter’s then-head of content moderation, Yoel Roth, who tweeted that the November 4 layoffs affected only “15% of the Trust & Safety organization (as opposed to approximately 50% cuts across company), Moderate front-line staff have the least impact.” Roth has since resigned from the company, joining an exodus of high-level leaders tasked with privacy, cybersecurity and regulatory compliance.
