Elon Musk is further gutting Twitter’s teams that battle misinformation on the social media platform, with outsourced content moderators the latest to learn they are out of a job. 

Twitter and other big social media firms have relied heavily on contractors to track hate and other harmful content. 

But now many of those content watchdogs now heading out the door after Twitter fired much of its full-time workforce by email. 

The social media platform is now moving to eliminate an untold number of contract jobs. 

Melissa Ingle, a data scientist who was one of a number of contractors that were terminated without notice, said she was concerned there would 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. 

Ms Ingle worked on the data and monitoring arm of Twitter’s civic integrity team, writing algorithms to find political misinformation on the platform in countries including the US, Brazil, Japan and Argentina. 

While Twitter has not revealed how many contract workers it has fired, content moderation expert and University of California associate professor Sarah Roberts revealed that over 3000 contractor employees of Twitter were canned last Sunday.

The social media company has also gutted its communications department and is no longer responding to media requests for information since Tesla CEO Elon Musk took over. 

Professor Roberts states that contractors also do other jobs to help keep Twitter running.

“All contractors are not content moderators,” she said. 

“Contractors fulfil many key roles inside the company but almost all moderation agents are contractors.” 

Musk bought Twitter for $US44 billion in late October and dismissed its board of directors and top executives. He then assured civil rights groups and advertisers the platform could continue tamping down hate. 

That message was reiterated by Twitter’s then-head of content moderation Yoel Roth, who tweeted that the November 4 layoffs only affected 15 per cent of the company’s Trust & Safety organisation “with our front-line moderation staff experiencing the least impact”. 

However, Mr 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. 

With AAP

Eliza Sayon

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Eliza is a content producer and editor at Public Spectrum. She is an experienced writer on topics related to the government and to the public, as well as stories that uplift and improve the community.

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