Elon Musk recently laid off more Twitter employees working on the platform's trust and safety efforts, roles typically crucial to keeping a social media platform safe for advertisers.
The cuts happened the first week of September, according to two people familiar with the company, one of the first targeted layoffs since he shrunk operations earlier this year. While this layoff only affected a handful of people, five to 10, it was focused entirely on workers in trust and safety. Such workers are responsible for overseeing daily communications on Twitter, and mitigating the appearance and spread of toxic content, mainly so businesses feel comfortable advertising on the platform. As Musk courts controversy, conspiracy, and antisemitism, the advertising business on Twitter, renamed X, has plummeted by more than half and usage has waned.
Full-time trust and safety employees previously went across the company, working in product, legal and engineering, and numbered about 230 people, and hundreds more doing additional work like content moderation on a contract basis, prior to Musk's takeover. They were almost entirely let go soon after. By mid-November, Twitter's trust and safety team had no engineers and no agents, as Insider reported, leaving the team mainly in the hands of people who did administrative work.
Further cuts to the team came in January. Musk went through two leaders of trust and safety, both of whom left the company after disagreements with Musk, and were not replaced as he whittled down headcount to just over 1,000 people.
Now, the team is a fraction of its original size, according to the people familiar. One of the people said there are currently about 20 full-time employees on the trust and safety team, some of whom were contract workers who were promoted over the summer to full-time roles at the company, not long after Linda Yaccarino joined as Twitter's CEO. The employees mainly engage in content moderation, the person familiar added, while a few members of the team work in legal or policy. Engineering needs are handled by any of the roughly 500 engineers left at X, most of whom have for months been working across the company.
A company spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.
Although the X trust and safety team had grown somewhat prior to this most recent round of layoffs and is technically overseen by Yaccarino and Musk, the platform's problems far outweigh the ability of a team that has few hands and seemingly little power. Musk reinstated numerous accounts of neo-Nazi users with large followings and even an account that posted images exploiting children. He kicked off a new wave of antisemitism on the platform after blaming the Anti-Defamation League, an anti-hate non-profit, for his troubles with advertising.
Meanwhile, Musk and Yaccarino have said in recent months that "99%" of the content on X is "healthy." Insider previously traced that assertion to a single case study by Sprinklr, a management software company, that looked at 500,000 tweets between January and February. The study found that 15% of those tweets contained one of 300 English slurs from a list provided by Twitter, although it claimed such tweets received less engagement than tweets without slurs. Nowhere does the study say that 99% of the content on the platform is healthy.
Are you a Twitter/X employee or someone else with insight to share? Contact Kali Hays at khays@insider.com, on secure messaging app Signal at 949-280-0267, or through Twitter DM at @hayskali. Reach out using a non-work device.
