Report: Musk fires Twitter curation team tackling misinformation
There’s as-yet unverified speculation that Elon Musk has fired Twitter’s curation team, which is responsible for countering misinformation posted to the social media network.
The claim comes (on Twitter, naturally) from Richie Assaly, a digital producer for the Toronto Star, who says he previously worked as a member of the curation team.
Assaly says team “leads, management and curators are all posting that they’ve been fired”.
The move, if true, “will make Twitter noisier, more dangerous & less interesting”, he asserts.
Looks like Elon Musk fired the entire curation team.
These were the folks who tackled misinfo, contextualized conversations via the ‘Explore’ page, and helped make Twitter an unmatched source for breaking news.
This will make Twitter noisier, more dangerous & less interesting
— Richie Assaly (@rdassaly) November 4, 2022
Musk, in his tweet blaming “activist groups” for pressuring advertisers to withdraw from Twitter, causing a “massive” drop in revenue, insisted: “nothing has changed with content moderation”.
Key events
Filters BETA
Twitter employee warns of potential cybersecurity attacks
NBC News has a new story out on the misinformation and chaos that current and fired employees fear will infect the site surrounding the election and Elon Musk’s proposed new system for verification.
Musk has said he plans to open up verification to users who are willing to pay $8; the checkmark system previously was used as a way for the site to verify the identity of the accounts.
Some fear that the new system, which Musk is apparently rushing to implement at a time of mass layoffs, could allow for users to impersonate people and could exacerbate problems with falsehoods and disinformation spreading on the site. In the lead up to a high-stakes election, where some candidates and officials have been making false claims and sowing doubt about results, the consequences could be dire.
Some details from NBC’s reporting:
-
Three current and former employees said “they didn’t see significant enforcement mechanisms to make sure users with the verification checks are who they say they are”, with one noting, “Twitter isn’t prepared for that scale.”
-
An employee who survived the layoffs said: “I expect a ton of cybersecurity attacks on Monday.” Monday is the day that Musk is reportedly trying to launch the new verification feature, though the company hasn’t publicly confirmed this, and it’s not clear if the site can meet that deadline, given the mass cuts.
-
Laura Edelson, a postdoctoral researcher at New York University, told NBC she’d already observed an uptick in content violating Twitter rules: “What I think we saw is a little preview of what Twitter is like without the trust and safety team having access to the tools that they need to do their jobs. I think that’s only a preview of what we’ll see if the trust and safety team either is gutted or just doesn’t exist.”
-
A remaining Twitter employee also questioned Musk’s logic with the new verification system, telling NBC: “He thinks the bots won’t pay money, so anyone without a blue mark will be a bot, in his logic.”
Elon Musk has continued to claim that the massive drop in revenue due to advertisers fleeing the site constitutes an “attack on the first amendment”.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Musk, speaking at an investment conference on Friday, echoed his tweets blaming activists for pressuring companies to pause their advertisements: “We’ve done our absolute best to appease them and nothing is working.” The Journal, which noted that the first amendment’s free speech protections generally apply to the government and not private companies, reported:
Musk acknowledged that the price he paid for Twitter was “on the high side” and made a joke referencing the movie The Godfather, noting he tried to get out of the deal but “they pulled me back in”.
He also claimed that “content moderation policies have not changed at Twitter”, though civil rights groups have warned that the mass layoffs will severely impact moderation.
His final remark to the conference, according to the Journal, was a plea for people to pay for the subscription to be verified, which he said would allow users to have their tweets higher up in the feed and allow for longer videos (in addition to granting them the blue check mark): “Please use Twitter and please subscribe to Twitter verified: eight bucks. Actually it’s technically $7.99, so slightly less.”
Which teams have been laid off at Twitter?
From news reports and terminated employees’ announcements, here’s what we know so far about the teams that have been hit by the layoffs of thousands of Twitter employees:
-
The human rights team has been laid off, according to a now former employee, Shannon Raj Singh, who said the team worked to protect those at risk in global conflicts, including in Ukraine, Afghanistan and Ethiopia.
-
The ML (machine learning) Ethics, Transparency and Accountability team is gone, according to a tweet of a laid-off manager.
-
The “internet technology team”, which helps keep the site running, has been cut to “a skeleton crew”, two sources told the Times.
-
An accessibly experience engineering team has been cut, according to a laid-off engineering manager.
-
The curation team, responsible for the Moments feature on Twitter, has also been cut, former employees reported.
-
Twitter’s communications department is almost entirely gone, according to the Verge.
-
Other areas that have been heavily impacted, the Verge reported, include product trust and safety, policy, research and social good.
NAACP urges all companies to stop advertisements on Twitter
The NAACP has called for a complete advertising boycott of Twitter.
Derrick Johnson, the NAACP’s president and CEO, who met with Elon Musk on Tuesday, issued a statement urging all companies to pause ads on the platform:
It is immoral, dangerous, and highly destructive to our democracy for any advertiser to fund a platform that fuels hate speech, election denialism, and conspiracy theories. Since Elon Musk has taken over Twitter, racial slurs have spiked, and conspiracy theories have spread. When we met with Elon Musk, he made commitments that gave us cautious optimism, but until actions are taken to make Twitter a safe space, corporations cannot in good conscience put their money behind Twitter. Twitter must earn its advertisers by creating a platform that safeguards our democracy and rids itself of any content or account that spews hate and disinformation. Any account promoting hate, election denialism and any other form of mis- or disinformation cannot be allowed to return to Twitter. As we did in 2020 for Facebook, the NAACP will meet with advertisers privately to discuss their ongoing relationship with Twitter. Unlike Elon Musk’s past ventures, this one should not be rocket science.”
Some details from a New York Times report about the haphazard mass terminations:
-
The firings were reportedly so chaotic that in “one late-night meeting about the Twitter Blue subscription product, at least one worker was locked out of the company’s systems during the call”.
-
For fired workers, “access was cut in a staggered and seemingly arbitrary fashion”, the report said. “Some people received text messages from colleagues saying they had been logged out of some work apps but were temporarily able to open their email or work apps, before they eventually lost access, too.”
Eddie Perez, a former manager of Twitter’s civic integrity team, who quit in September, told the Associated Press he fears the mass layoffs so close to the midterms could allow disinformation to “spread like wildfire”, especially in the period after the election when votes are still being counted:
“I have a hard time believing that it doesn’t have a material impact on their ability to manage the amount of disinformation out there,” he said, adding that there simply may not be enough employees to beat it back.
Perez is now a board member at an election integrity nonprofit, the OSET Institute. He warned that “some candidates may not concede and some may allege election irregularities and that is likely to generate a new cycle of falsehoods”.
This is an impt point.
The “curation” team at Twitter includes many former journalists, and the team was very impactful in elevating credible, authoritative content from responsible news sources, to pre- and debunk disinformation.
Firing them before an election is dumb, dumb. https://t.co/Xfhi09L9Ij
— Edward Perez (@eddie1perez) November 4, 2022
Elon Musk has responded to a tweet criticizing the platform’s ad system, saying he “agreed” that “Twitter has the worst ad platform of any social media company”.
The tweet he was responding to said Twitter’s “AD roi is so terrible that its virtually a black hole”.
Musk, who is overseeing mass layoffs today, said he’s “working on it”.
CNN has some details of Elon Musk’s appearance at an investment conference in New York on Friday morning, at which he largely ignored the furore over Twitter and spoke warmly of electric cars and spaceships.
In what the network says was “a friendly interview” with financier Ron Baron, a prominent shareholder of Musk’s electric car company Tesla, the billionaire spoke of his ambition to drive down the cost of his vehicles, and one day reach Mars through his SpaceX venture.
In brief comments about his $44bn purchase of Twitter, Musk said: “I tried to get out of the deal,” then added, “I think there is a tremendous amount of potential… and I think it could be one of the most valuable companies in the world”.
Baron, according to CNN, said that Musk had laid off “half of Twitter” and Musk nodded, although he did not comment on the remark. He appeared to frame the layoffs as necessary for a company that, like other social media firms, was experiencing “revenue challenges” prior to his acquisition as advertisers rethink spending amid recession fears.
Musk acknowledged that “a number of major advertisers have stopped spending on Twitter” in the week since he acquired the company, but did not expand on his tweet from earlier today blaming “activist groups” for driving advertising revenue away.
Employment lawyer: Musk at risk of discrimination claims
The speed of layoffs could expose Elon Musk and Twitter to discrimination claims if it turns out they disproportionally affected women, people of color, or older workers, an employment lawyer has told the Associated Press.
Attorney Peter Rahbar, founder of the New York law firm the Rahbar Group, told the agency that most employers “take great care in doing layoffs of this magnitude”.
He said: “First, they want to make sure there is justification, and second that a nondiscriminatory process is used. And third, they want to do everything they can not to draw attention to it, for these reasons.
“For some reason, [Musk] wants to lay off half the company without doing any due diligence on what these people do or who they are and without any regards to the law”.
Twitter is already facing a class action lawsuit filed in San Francisco on Thursday by ex-employees who say they were denied the required notice period that they were about to lose their jobs.
Summary
It’s after 3pm in New York (where Elon Musk has spent much of the day) and time to take stock of what’s been happening:
-
Thousands of now former Twitter employees have learned they are being laid off as billionaire owner Elon Musk continues the transformation of his newly purchased social media titan.
-
Musk posted a tweet blaming “activist groups” for pressuring advertisers to withdraw from Twitter, causing a “massive drop in revenue”. The company appended, and later removed, a note to the post adding “context”, suggesting advertisers were concerned about the platform’s direction.
-
Scores of former employees (known as Tweeps), from numerous areas of the company, posted farewell messages, setting the hashtags #LoveWhereYouWorked and #OneTeam trending.
-
Reports suggest Musk has axed entire departments at Twitter, including the curation team moderating misinformation; a human rights team; and another responsible for machine language ethics, transparency and accountability.
-
Twitter is facing a class action lawsuit from former employees who say they were not given enough notice under US federal law that they had lost their jobs, finding out they had been let go when they were locked out of their work accounts.
Please stay with us, there’s plenty more Twitter news to come.
[ad_2]
Share this news on your Fb,Twitter and Whatsapp
Times News Network:Latest News Headlines
Times News Network||Health||New York||USA News||Technology||World News
