Musk cuts staff by half blaming activists for ‘massive’ revenue drop

Palo Alto, California: Twitter laid off half its workforce on Friday but said cuts were smaller in the team responsible for preventing the spread of misinformation, but advertisers pulled spending amid concerns about content moderation.

Tweets by staff of the social media company said teams responsible for communications, content curation, human rights and machine learning ethics were among those gutted, as were some product and engineering teams.

Elon Musk arrives at Baron Investment Conference at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York on Friday. Credit:

The move caps a week of chaos and uncertainty about the company’s future under new owner Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, who tweeted that the service was experiencing a “massive drop in revenue” from the advertiser retreat. He is seeking to slash costs and impose a demanding new work ethic, according to internal plans reviewed by Reuters.

“In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday,” said the email sent on Thursday.

The week after the billionaire took over and promised sweeping changes, workers around the world were checking two email addresses to find out if they still had a job, according to an internal memo sent to employees. An email to their work account means they’ve been retained. A letter in their personal inbox means they’ve been fired.

Emails were signed only by “Twitter”, without naming Musk or any other executives.

Dozens of staffers tweeted they had lost access to work email and Slack channels overnight before receiving an official layoff notice, prompting an outpouring of laments by current and former employees on the platform they had built.

They shared blue hearts and salute emojis expressing support for one another, using the hashtags #OneTeam and #LoveWhereYouWorked, a past-tense version of a slogan employees had used for years to celebrate the company’s work culture.

Shannon Raj Singh, an attorney who was Twitter’s acting head of human rights, tweeted that the entire human rights team at the company had been sacked.

A team that focused on research into how the company employed machine learning and algorithms, an issue that was a priority for Musk, was also eliminated, according to a tweet from a former senior manager.

Employees of Twitter Blue, the premium subscription service that Musk is promoting in order to improve revenue, were also let go. An employee with the handle “SillyRobin” who had indicated they were laid off, quote-tweeted a previous Musk tweet saying Twitter Blue would include “paywall bypass” for certain publishers.

“Just to be clear, he fired the team working on this,” the employee said.

Musk blamed the advertising losses on a coalition of civil rights groups that has been pressing Twitter’s top advertisers to take action if he did not protect content moderation – concerns heightened ahead of potential pivotal congressional elections on Tuesday.

After the layoffs, the groups said they were escalating their pressure and demanding brands pull their Twitter ads globally.

“Unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day,” Musk tweeted, adding that everyone affected was offered three months of severance pay.

The company was silent about the depth of the cuts until late in the day, when head of safety and integrity Yoel Roth tweeted confirmation of internal plans, seen by Reuters earlier in the week, projecting the layoffs would affect about 3700 people, or 50 per cent of the staff.

Among those let go were 784 employees from the company’s San Francisco headquarters and 199 in San Jose and Los Angeles, according to filings to California’s employment authority.

Roth said the reductions hit about 15 per cent of his team, which is responsible for preventing the spread of misinformation and other harmful content, and that the company’s “core moderation capabilities” remained in place.

Musk endorsed the safety executive last week, citing his “high integrity” after Roth was called out over tweets critical of former US president Donald Trump years earlier.

Musk has promised to restore free speech while preventing Twitter from descending into a “hellscape”.

President Joe Biden said that Musk had purchased a social media platform that spewed lies across the world.

“And now what are we all worried about: Elon Musk goes out and buys an outfit that sends ... that spews lies all across the world... There’s no editors anymore in America. There’s no editors. How do we expect kids to be able to understand what is at stake?”

Major advertisers have expressed apprehension about Musk’s takeover for months. Brands including Volkswagen, General Motors and General Mills have said they stopped advertising on Twitter while awaiting information about the new direction of the platform.

Musk tweeted that his team had made no changes to content moderation and done “everything we could” to appease the groups. Speaking at an investors’ conference in New York on Friday, he called the activist pressure “an attack on the First Amendment”.

The company hired consulting firm KPMG in some international markets, including in Asia, to assist with the layoffs, according to one person familiar with the manner.

Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.

A class action lawsuit was filed has been filed against Twitter by its employees, who argued the company was conducting mass layoffs without providing the required 60-day advance notice, in violation of federal and California law.

Reuters and Bloomberg