This story is developing.
Elon Musk is wasting no time following through on rumors of his promise to gut Twitter’s workforce. Upon his recent $44 billion purchase of the social media platform, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO floated firing about half of the company’s roughly 7,500 employees. In an internal, unsigned email sent to staff yesterday and subsequently circulated online, it was conveyed that “in an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global work force.” A few employees already reported receiving termination notices on Thursday, with many more announcing wholesale shutdowns of various departments early this morning.
As reported by Gizmodo, at least five former employees are already readying a class action lawsuit against Twitter for failure to comply with California’s WARN Act, “a law that requires large employers to provide 60 days of notice to employees before mass layoffs.” Meanwhile, as many as 1 million users have already deactivated their Twitter accounts, according to MIT Technology Review.
A running list of what areas Twitter HQ is shuttering can be found below, along with brief explanations of their functions. Any former or current Twitter employees are encouraged to reach out to PopSci by emailing [email protected] and/or [email protected]
Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability (META) Team
Confirmed via former Twitter employee Joan Deitchman, the META team (not relation to Facebook’s parent company) was responsible for “researching and pushing for algorithmic transparency and algorithmic choice… studying algorithmic amplification… [and] inventing and building ethical AI tooling and methodologies.”
The department’s dissolution could make it more difficult to understand how Twitter’s algorithms decide what stories and trends are pushed more than others, as well as decrease transparency in the ways the company decides to mitigate and address AI bias.
Curation Team
Confirmed via former employee, Andrew Haigh, the Curation Team’s recently launched website described its focus as being “responsible for highlighting and contextualizing the best events and stories that unfold on Twitter… including Topics, Trends descriptions, and Moments, makes it easy for customers to experience only-on-Twitter conversations and get the most out of the platform, regardless of which accounts they follow.” Another former team member, James Glynn, was the group’s Senior Curation Lead dedicated to “Misinfo, Elections, [and] Crisis Situations.”
Decreased focus on how stories and news cycles are both promoted, described, and fact-checked could make it much harder for Twitter users to trust trending topics’ veracity and objectivity.
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