San Francisco: Twitter sacked half of its 7,500-strong staff on Friday as new owner Elon Musk launched his major overhaul of the troubled company just a week after his blockbuster takeover.
An internal document seen by AFP said “roughly 50 percent” of employees were impacted and would be denied access to company computers and email on an immediate basis.
Workers around the world were shown the door and took to Twitter to vent their frustration or disbelief and say goodbye to one of Silicon Valley’s most iconic companies.
Twitter head of safety and integrity Yoel Roth tried to soothe concerns, saying that about 15 percent of his department had been let go in comparison to the 50-percent cuts company-wide.
The site’s “core moderation capabilities remain in place,” he tweeted.
Here are some of the teams either eliminated outright or hit hard by the layoffs, and what the new incarnation of Twitter will be losing in the process.
Human Rights
Former Twitter Human Rights Counsel Shannon Raj Singh shared news that the company’s human rights team was eliminated Friday.
Accessibility Experience
Twitter’s now former head of accessibility confirmed that the company cut the accessibility experience team, which improved the product for people with disabilities. The team appears to have had a lot still in the works before it was disbanded.
Communications
It’s not yet clear what parts of Twitter’s communications team have been cut outright, but the cuts are deep enough that many prominent comms employees at the company, including many contacts that TechCrunch has spoken with over the years, were affected.
Machine learning ethics, transparency and accountability
Musk dissolved a team known internally as META, which was well-respected for its exploratory work in ethical AI and algorithmic transparency. Rumman Chowdhury, the team’s director, was eliminated, along with the team’s engineers and other members.
Curation
Some of the layoffs make sense, given the things Musk apparently has little regard for (human rights and accessibility, alarming!), but Twitter’s new owner apparently also made cuts to teams that seemed poised to help him extract more value from the company. The curation team curated the moments tab, programmed the trending topics section, provided context on those topics and also handled live events — many of the things Twitter does best. The team also worked to fight misinformation on the platform — a serious and consequential concerns that Musk has already made worse in less than seven days on the job.
Public policy
Politico reports that half of the company’s public policy team was let go, including Michele Austin, the former director of public policy and elections in Canada and the U.S. who was actively working on the U.S. midterms. Those cuts reportedly also included Twitter team members who work to verify the accounts of political figures.
