"Hardest Experience": Twitter's Former Head Of Trust And Safety On Working With Elon Musk

Ella Irwin, Twitter's former Head of Trust and Safety resigned from the social media company in June this year. In a recent interview with NBC News, she stated that working at the company under the new boss Elon Musk was “the hardest experience” in her career. 

“It absolutely was the hardest experience that I've gone through in my career,” Ms Irwin told the outlet. She resigned from the microblogging website after Mr Musk “criticized moderation actions that had been taken at the company around the issue of misgendering.

Ms Irwin stated that she left the company because there was clarity on the fact that “there was no longer alignment” between the microblogging website and her “nonnegotiable principles.” She said, “One was this notion of freedom of speech versus freedom of reach. It was important to me that there was an understanding that hate speech, for example, violent graphic content, things like that, were not promoted, advertised, amplified.”

She enlisted another reason for her departure and told the outlet, “I'm a big believer in giving people the ability to make the decisions that are right for them. Who they want to follow, what they don't want to see, they should be able to create and choose their own adventure.” 

Further Ms Irwin informed that she is still bound by a nondisclosure agreement with the company, but she intends to use her podcast to address professional and personal lessons she learned while working at X.  Mr Musk, she added, came to Twitter with "startup energy," eager to "move fast and make changes." Massive layoffs were among one of his first changes. “I don't think I've ever seen anything like that,” she said about job cuts.

Ms Irwin, who had joined Twitter in June 2022, took over as Head of the Trust and Safety team in November when previous head Yoel Roth resigned. She oversaw content moderation. 

The former executive said that the billionaire could be “impulsive” at times. However, she learnt a lot from him in the short duration she worked with him. “There's more emotion behind his decisions than I would have maybe expected before I met him. And I think that contributes to some of the impulsiveness. Elon is very good at questioning everything, boiling things down to first principles, removing constraints, and that can be very powerful when you need to drive a lot of change very quickly,” she said. 

Ms Irwin added that she is enjoying a break from work at the moment. On asking whether she would ever return to X, she said, “You never say never, right? But I think there would have to be a lot of things that would have to change. Companies change, leadership teams change, a lot of things happen — but I don't know that that would happen anytime soon.