Elon Musk arrives at Baron Investment Conference at the Metropolitan Opera House, Friday, November 4, 2022, in New York.
photo: AP/Yuki Iwamura
Twitter official says 50% of employees have been laid off, including 15% from the "Safety and Integrity" team.
On Friday, US President Joe Biden on the billionaire Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, said that Musk had bought a social networking platform that spreads lies around the world.
"Now what worries us all, is Elon Musk's purchase of a tool that sends lies around the world...There are no more editors in America. There are no editors. How can we expect children to be risk-aware?" Biden warned.
The head of the Safety and Integrity Department at Twitter, Yoel Roth announced earlier Friday, in a tweet that the company had laid off 50 percent of its employees, while he said that there had been no change in content monitoring on Twitter.
Roth added that 15% of Twitter employees on the Safety and Integrity team, which monitors misinformation and harmful content, have been laid off. He added that company-wide layoffs affected 50 percent of employees, the first confirmation from Twitter insider about the scale of the layoffs.
"Again, to be absolutely clear, Twitter's strong commitment to content moderation remains absolutely unchanged," Musk said in a tweet shortly after Roth's tweet.
Musk had previously said Twitter had seen a "massive drop in revenue" due to civil rights groups that have raised concerns about how layoffs will affect content moderation and have pressured major advertisers to withdraw their ad spending.
As some oppose Musk’s takeover of the platform that us largely used by civil society groups and politicians, many back Musk’s new policies in the Twitter and call it a return of freedom to the platform.