The new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk has continued to cut down the size of the social media networks team as an undisclosed number of contracted content moderators learned over the weekend that their contracts have been terminated.
Twitter fired quite a number of its full-time employees on November 4. through an email notifying them that their services were no longer needed, and now the table has turned towards the outsourced workers as an undisclosed number of content moderators were fired during the weekend.
Twitter and many other social media platforms depend largely on contract workers to battle hate and enforce rules against harmful content.
As most of these content policy armies are shown the through the door, it could be a piece of bad news for Twitter.
Melissa Ingle, who worked at Twitter as a contractor for more than a year, was one of a number of contractors who said they were terminated Saturday. She said she’s concerned that there’s going to be an increase in abuse on Twitter with the number of workers leaving.
“I love the platform and I really enjoyed working at the company and trying to make it better. And I’m just really fearful of what’s going to slip through the cracks,” she said Sunday.
Content moderation expert Sarah Roberts, an associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles who worked as a staff researcher at Twitter earlier this year, said she believes at least 3,000 contract workers were fired Saturday night.
Twitter hasn’t made any statement yet. The company hasn’t responded to media requests for information since Musk took over.
