Daily Times

In his first week as Twitter’s CEO, Elon Musk has sacked half of Twitter’s 7500 employees with some predicting even more layoffs in the near future. The business magnate claimed that Twitter’s current workforce was jeopardizing the company’s revenues and hoped to bring a new vision to the table. Musk argued that the company’s profit margins suffered under its old leadership, which prioritized content moderation and platform safety, as opposed to advertising, which brings in over 90 per cent of Twitter’s annual revenue.

Staff woke up on Friday to find that they had been locked out of the company’s servers, with an email informing them that their positions were under review. The company’s curation team, responsible for moderating content on the website, was also completely gutted, along with its human rights division and algorithmic ethics staff. Employees expressed their concern that in the absence of a trained team of moderators, the platform could become “more toxic” with no one left to vet sensitive information and hate speech which has apparently exploded across the platform since Musk’s takeover, Dissolving the moderation staff a crucial four days before the US midterm elections might be a grave mistake that Musk cannot recover from. Morale is plummeting among Twitter’s remaining staff, who perceive the layoffs as a major violation of trust.

The SpaceX CEO, who has previously called himself a “free speech absolutist,” claimed that the company would remain devoted to content moderation and “election integrity.” However, he was unable to assuage big advertisers, such as Pfizer and General Motors, who have begun halting their advertisements over concerns of misinformation.

Now comes the bigger question: are Twitter’s massive layoffs even legal? Musk claimed that his employees were given three months’ severance before they were fired but this has been contested by Twitter’s staff who claim that Musk’s practices are in violation of California’s labour laws. One employee filed a class-action suit based on the company’s firing practices. Indeed, the abruptness of the layoffs is hard to shrug off and threatens to damage Twitter’s corporate culture, which employees claim, was built on trust. The website’s future is deeply uncertain right now, but there’s one thing that we do know for sure: under Musk’s eclectic leadership, Twitter as we know it will never be the same again. *