Twitter starts firing Indian employees; content moderation team reduced to 15 people: Report | Digit

Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter turned out to be a nightmare for the employees as the company reportedly laid off 3,738 people out of its total workforce of 7,500, a report by Tribune India mentions. Earlier this week, the company sent out an email to all its employees saying they will be notified whether they are retained or fired by Friday, November 4, 2022. 

Twitter lays off a majority of its staff in India

The mass layoffs come at a time when Twitter is facing a massive drop in advertising revenue. From what it looks like, the company is running low on income. It is unable to meet its costs, which could also be the reason behind the massive layoffs and a hasty push in revenue streams, including the controversial Twitter Blue subscription that includes verification.    

Citing PTI, Tribune India reports that the microblogging platform laid off almost half its staff on November 4, 2022. Twitter has also fired “the majority of its over 200 employees in India.” In addition, Twitter India’s entire marketing and communications staff has been fired. As per sources, people were fired from the engineering team as well. 

Justifying these job cuts, Twitter mentioned in its email to employees that it is an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path. Ironically, Musk-led Twitter has instructed the employees from discussing any aspect of the layoffs or related information on social media platforms. 

Twitter’s current content moderation team might be limited to 15 people

The job cut’s full details were unavailable while writing this report. As per a report by Reuters, “cuts were smaller in the team responsible for preventing the spread of misinformation.” However, this contradicts another report from Bloomberg that said the present content moderation team had been reduced to 15. 

Yes, you read that right! The report mentions that Twitter “has frozen some employee access to internal tools used for content moderation and other policy enforcement, curbing the staff’s ability to clamp down on misinformation ahead of a major US election.”

Previously, the Twitter staff used agent tools to ban or suspend accounts deemed to have violated the content policy. However, since Muskk’s takeover, these tools are no longer available to the concerned team. Typically, the access to content moderation tools is with hundreds of Twitter employees, but last week, it was reduced to about 15 people. 

The restriction is in place purposefully as Twitter wants to keep its software code safe during the change to new ownership. Meanwhile, Twitter is temporarily closing its offices “for the safety of employees as well as Twitter systems and customer data.”