SEATTLE — Seattle-based Twitter employees have been impacted by the thousands of recent layoffs at the company that happened on Friday, Nov. 4.
According to the Washington State Employment Security Office, the 208 permanent layoffs will begin Jan. 4.
About half of Twitter's 7,500 employees have been laid off since Elon Musk took control of the company last week, Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of safety & integrity, tweeted.
Musk tweeted late Friday that there was no choice but to cut the jobs “when the company is losing over $4M/day." He did not provide details on the daily losses at the company and said employees who lost their jobs were offered three months' pay as a severance.
Twitter’s employees have been expecting layoffs since Musk took the helm. He fired top executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal, and removed the company's board of directors on his first day as owner.
No other social media platform comes close to Twitter as a place where public agencies and other vital service providers — election boards, police departments, utilities, schools and news outlets — keep people reliably informed. Many fear Musk’s layoffs will gut it and render it lawless.
Roth said the company’s front-line moderation staff was the group the least impacted by the job cuts.
He added that Twitter’s “efforts on election integrity — including harmful misinformation that can suppress the vote and combatting state-backed information operations — remain a top priority.”
However, Twitter is struggling to respond to political misinformation and other harmful posts on the social media platform after the layoffs just days before the U.S. midterm elections, according to employees who survived the cuts and an outside voting rights group.
The recent mass layoffs spared many of the people whose job it is to keep hate and misinformation off the social media platform. But in preparation for the layoffs, employees said the company also sharply reduced how many employees can look into a specific account’s digital history and behavior — a practice necessary to investigate if it’s been used maliciously.