How Will Twitter Moderate Content After Mass Layoffs? Employee Answers

Twitter sacked nearly half of its 7,500 employees a week after billionaire Elon Musk acquired the microblogging platform. The layoff has affected Twitter workers across the world, including India, where employees were denied access to the company's internal systems and offices were locked.

While the move has raised concerns over the company's future, Yoel Roth, Twitter's Head of Safety and Integrity, has said that its core moderation capabilities remain unaffected despite the layoff.

In a Twitter thread, Yoel Roth explained “the facts about where Twitter's Trust & Safety and moderation capacity stands today”.

Here are the facts about where Twitter's Trust & Safety and moderation capacity stands today:

tl;dr: While we said goodbye to incredibly talented friends and colleagues yesterday, our core moderation capabilities remain in place.

— Yoel Roth (@yoyoel) November 4, 2022

Mr Roth wrote that the massive job cuts at Twitter impacted roughly 15 per cent of the company's Trust and Safety organisation but the front-line moderation staff was least affected.  

Yesterday's reduction in force affected approximately 15% of our Trust & Safety organization (as opposed to approximately 50% cuts company-wide), with our front-line moderation staff experiencing the least impact.

— Yoel Roth (@yoyoel) November 4, 2022

Mr Roth highlighted that last week Twitter had to restrict access to its internal tools for some employees due to security reasons. “Including some members of my team,” he added. However, Mr Roth said, the majority of the over 2,000 content moderators working on the front-line review were not impacted and their “access will be fully restored in the coming days”.

Last week, for security reasons, we restricted access to our internal tools for some users, including some members of my team. Most of the 2,000+ content moderators working on front-line review were not impacted, and access will be fully restored in the coming days.

— Yoel Roth (@yoyoel) November 4, 2022

Sharing infographics on the volume of tweets “reviewed and actioned” by the team, Mr Roth claimed that over 80 per cent of Twitter's incoming content moderation volume was not affected by the move. He added that the daily volume of moderation actions taken by the team remained steady throughout the period.

More than 80% of our incoming content moderation volume was completely unaffected by this access change. The daily volume of moderation actions we take stayed steady through this period. pic.twitter.com/rSGKtq0e3J

— Yoel Roth (@yoyoel) November 4, 2022

Mr Roth stressed that early voting is taking place in the US and Twitter is prioritising and maintaining election integrity which includes curbing misinformation on the platform and “combatting state-backed information operations”.

With early voting underway in the US, our efforts on election integrity — including harmful misinformation that can suppress the vote and combatting state-backed information operations — remain a top priority.

— Yoel Roth (@yoyoel) November 4, 2022

Further, the executive shared that amid the layoff, Twitter had to deprioritise a few workflows such as requests for lost passwords and account suspension appeals. “We are working to get these back online in the days to come,” he added.

What AREN'T we doing? In the short term, we've had to deprioritize a few workflows — like account access (lost password requests), and some suspension appeals. We're working to get these back online in the days to come.

— Yoel Roth (@yoyoel) November 4, 2022

Mr Roth said he will be sharing updates about Twitter's trust and safety work and emphasised that its policies of protecting the conversation taking place on the platform remain unchanged.

I'll continue to share updates about our Trust & Safety work as things evolve in the days to come. Our team's mission of enforcing our policies and protecting the conversations happening on Twitter remains unchanged.

— Yoel Roth (@yoyoel) November 4, 2022

After Twitter showed the door to half of its workforce, experts warned that this might affect the platform's ability to combat misinformation especially when midterm elections are scheduled for next week in the US.