The company began sweeping staff cuts worldwide on Friday, with suggestions that up to half of its more than 7,500 staff could lose their jobs. Musk tweeted on Friday night: “Regarding reducing the power of Twitter, unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over $4 million/day. Those who were leaving were offered 3 months of severance.” Musk is believed to be looking to drastically cut the company’s costs after completing a $US44 billion ($39 billion) acquisition of the platform last week. It tweeted a series of posts from Twitter’s chief security officer, Yoel Roth, who said: “Here’s the evidence of where Twitter’s trust and security and moderation capability stands today. While we said goodbye to incredibly talented friends and colleagues yesterday, our core capabilities of moderation remain in place. “Yesterday’s power reduction affected approximately 15% of the Trust & Safety organization (as opposed to approximately 50% company-wide cuts), with frontline moderation staff having the least impact. “Last week, for security reasons, we restricted access to our internal tools for some users, including some members of my team. Most of the more than 2,000 content moderators working on frontline control were not affected and access will be fully restored in the coming days. “More than 80% of inbound content moderation volume was completely unaffected by this access change. The daily volume of moderation actions we take has remained stable over this period.” Musk followed it up with a tweet saying, “Again, to be clear, Twitter’s strong commitment to content moderation remains absolutely unchanged. In fact, we’ve actually seen hate speech at times this week drop below our previous norms, contrary to what you might read in the press.” It had earlier accused “activist groups” of pressuring advertisers to leave the platform, causing revenue to fall. The Tesla owner also responded to user posts and memes about the ad, saying, “Twitter will not censor accurate information about anything.” Internet safety groups and activists have raised concerns about Musk’s plans to allow more free speech on the site and reverse permanent bans placed on controversial figures, including Donald Trump. Alex Hern’s weekly dive into how technology is shaping our lives Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Joe Biden said at a campaign event in Illinois on Friday night: “Now what are we all worried about? Elon Musk, who goes out and buys an outfit that sends and spews lies around the world. How do we expect children to be able to understand what’s at stake?’ In the UK, the Prospect union, which represents thousands of tech workers, including employees at Twitter, said in a letter to business secretary Grant Shapps that the company had acted “in an unacceptable manner”. Simon Deakin, a law professor at Cambridge University, said that if 100 or more employees of a company are made redundant within a 90-day period, the business secretary must be notified 45 days before the first redundancy. When there are more than 20 but less than 100 potential losses, the period is 30 days. Deakin said: “If effective notice is not given here then there could be a fine, so the employer or the manager could be fined. And the fine currently has no limit and is a criminal offence. “If they fire 100 workers, then there’s a potential for a criminal offence, we don’t know the full story, who the facility is and maybe they’ve given notice.”
