Twitter layoffs raise questions about future of infrastructure and moderation

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/04/twitter-layoffs-misinformation-moderation

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With advertisers cutting ties and pressure to pay back loans worth $13bn, the new direction for revenue has come under questioning

Layoffs of hundreds of Twitter employees have raised alarm about the future of the platform as it continues to restructure under the ownership of Elon Musk, who purchased the company for $44bn last week.

Musk, upon taking the helm of Twitter has made sweeping changes to the company, on Friday beginning mass layoffs across a number of sections – including marketing, product, engineering, legal and trust and safety.

The layoffs come as the company’s new billionaire owner scrambles to turn a profit at Twitter after purchasing the company at a far higher cost than it was valued, facing immediate pressure to pay back approximately $13bn in loans.

On Friday afternoon, Twitter’s head of safety appeared to confirm that roughly half of the company’s workforce has been cut, which would amount to an estimated 3,700 jobs.

The company has confirmed few details about the layoffs, including which teams had been affected. News reports and announcements from terminated employees suggested that among the teams that had been impacted were the curation team, the communications department, the human rights team, the machine learning ethics, transparency and accountability team, the internet technology team and the accessibility engineering team.

Combined with news earlier this week that Musk had directed Twitter teams this week to find up to $1bn in annual infrastructure cost savings, the cuts signaled new directions for Twitter in terms of revenue streams and raised questions about the future of critical infrastructure and content moderation on the platform.

With possible cuts to spending on critical resources such as cloud storage and servers, experts are particularly concerned as the US midterm elections approach, when larger numbers of users than usual go to the platform to follow breaking news and share information.

An internal source at the company told Reuters the infrastructure cuts were “delusional”, adding that when user traffic kicks up, the service can fail “in spectacular ways”.

The layoffs are also calling into question Twitter’s ability to keep the platform safe and secure, and come after a whistleblower accused the company of “egregious” failings in security and safety.

“Elon Musk’s layoffs to Twitter’s policy enforcement teams will destroy the platform’s capacity to stop the spread of hate speech, misinformation and disinformation at a time when the American public and voters need access to facts and civil discourse more than ever,” said Jim Steyer, founder and CEO of digital rights group Common Sense Media.

The reports of drastic cuts to the communications staff raised concerns Twitter may follow in the path of other Musk companies like Tesla, which do not communicate with the press. Musk, who has historically had an adversarial relationship with media, dissolved the electric car company’s public relations department in 2020 in an unprecedented move.

In response to Musk’s changes at the platform, advocates are calling for advertisers to pull out. The large number of employees being laid off at Twitter will make it “impossible for the company to uphold critical brand safeguards and content moderation standards”, said the #StopToxicTwitter Coalition, a group of more than 60 civil rights groups formed to sound the alarm about the direction of the company.

“Elon Musk has demonstrated that it’s not possible for him to keep the brand safeguards that have existed on Twitter in place,” said Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America, part of the coalition. “There’s no more time for trust but verify, it’s time for escalation.”

The group had publicly urged Twitter’s top 20 advertisers to leave the platform if Musk followed through on plans to undermine content moderation practices. After Friday’s layoffs, it is encouraging those companies to follow through and pull advertising from Twitter.

Several companies have already done so, with Volkswagen AG’s Audi, General Mills and General Motors all pausing advertising spend at Twitter indefinitely. Musk responded to the effort in a tweet on Friday morning, saying: “Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers.”

Advertising made up 90% of Twitter revenue last year, making the ongoing battle over brand perception of the platform critical to Musk’s business plan. He assured advertisers in an earlier meeting that Twitter would not become a “free-for-all hellscape” and said he would not reinstate any accounts or make major content decisions before convening a new “content moderation council”.

The billionaire has also floated a number of ideas for other streams of revenue, including a plan to charge for “verified” badges, and creating an “everything app” that would combine several platforms into one, but has not taken concrete action on either of those ventures.