Twitter Australia left a shell as online safety commissioner pans cuts

Twitter Australia has been left a shell of its former self, with staff in its government relations, communications, marketing and news curation divisions almost entirely laid off as part of global job cuts at the social network.

The local cuts, the scale of which was first revealed by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, were made official over the weekend, sources close to the company said. The sales team, which tries to bring advertisers to the platform, were least affected.

eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant has panned Elon Musk’s cuts to Twitter teams working on keeping users safe.Credit: Rhett Wyman

The Australian eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, who once headed public policy for Twitter in the region, panned the global job cuts.

“The approach of culling employees who have particular expertise in trust and safety functions, with intimate knowledge of how the platform’s policies and tools work, potentially undermines the company’s ability to combat abuse, misinformation and harms in the future,” she said.

On Sunday AEDT, Twitter began rolling out its plans to let anyone receive a blue tick, which has long been used to set verified accounts apart from impersonators, for $US7.99 ($12.40) a month.

Elon Musk, Twitter’s new billionaire owner, said on the site that people with existing blue ticks who declined to pay would lose them within a couple of months. The paid blue-tick service is not yet available in Australia, but is expected within days.

Prominent Australian Twitter users are unlikely to pay. Australian Council of Trade Unions secretary Sally McManus, who has 126,000 followers, said she would not. Labor MP Julian Hill, who has almost 50,000, said he was unsure if he would pay but that he was concerned by events around Twitter. Former 7.30 NSW presenter Quentin Dempster, who has 55,000 followers, said he did not want to pay Musk.

“Everybody is watching how he develops Twitter and if it becomes a malign force, alternatives are available,” Dempster said.

Leaders at most media organisations have previously indicated they would be unwilling to pay for their journalists’ ticks, though Musk has decreased the asking price since.

Twitter’s Australian communications team did not respond to requests for comment and emails to their former addresses bounced. At least one Twitter government affairs staffer resigned at around the same time as the redundancies were rolled out.

Yoel Roth, Twitter’s global head of safety and integrity, has defended Twitter, saying his division had experienced fewer staff cuts than other areas and its core ability to moderate the platform by taking down posts that breach its rules remained intact.

Musk has said a council of experts would work out which posts to take down, though there is no detail on that model. He has also emphasised the importance of free speech.

Inman Grant, the independent government official responsible for stopping bullying and abuse online, said Musk’s permissiveness would increase the amount of “hate and harm” on Twitter.

“The idea that you could replace your trust and safety teams with an effective oversight board to adjudicate and remove this content at scale doesn’t seem realistic,” she said.

Sunday’s change to the way blue ticks work represents the end of Twitter’s current verification system, which was launched in 2009 to prevent impersonations of high-profile accounts belonging to celebrities and politicians. Before the overhaul, Twitter had about 423,000 verified accounts, many of them rank-and-file journalists from around the globe that the company verified regardless of how many followers they had.

Anyone being able to get a blue tick could lead to confusion and the rise of disinformation ahead of Tuesday’s US midterm elections if impostors pay for the subscription and use the names of politicians and election officials.

Along with widespread layoffs that began on Friday, many fear the social platform that public agencies, election boards, police departments and news outlets use to keep people reliably informed could become lawless if content moderation and verification are chipped away.

Experts have raised grave concerns about upending the platform’s verification system that, while not perfect, had helped Twitter’s 238 million daily users determine whether the accounts they were getting information from were authentic.

Musk, who had earlier said that he wants to “verify all humans” on Twitter, has floated that public figures would be identified in ways other than the blue tick. Currently, for instance, government officials are identified with text under names stating that they are posting from an official government account.

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey on Saturday took blame for the job losses. He had two runs as CEO of Twitter, with the most recent stretching from 2015 into 2021.

“I own the responsibility for why everyone is in this situation: I grew the company size too quickly,” he tweeted. “I apologise for that.”

Musk tweeted late on Friday that there was no choice but to cut the jobs “when the company is losing over $4m/day”. He did not provide details on the daily losses at the company, and said employees who lost their jobs were offered three months’ pay as a severance.

Meanwhile, Twitter has already seen “a massive drop in revenue” because of pressure from activist groups on advertisers to get off the platform, Musk tweeted on Friday. That hits Twitter hard because of its heavy reliance so far on advertising to make money. During the first six months of this year, nearly $US92 of every $US100 it made in revenue came from advertising.

With AP

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