Monday, November 14, 2022 – Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk has fired thousands of Twitter contractors for battling misinformation on the site a week after sacking half of its permanent staff.
According to Mail Online, the social media giant fired its contractors that track hate and other harmful content on Saturday. Some of the contractors said they didn’t realize they were sacked until they weren’t able to log onto work on Saturday November 12.
The move comes after Twitter fired much of its full-time workforce by email on November 4. About 4,400 of 5,500 contractors have been fired, according to Reporter Casey Newton from Platformer News.
Melissa Ingle, who worked at Twitter as a contractor for more than a year, was one of a number of contractors who said they were terminated without notification on Saturday. She said she’s concerned that there’s going to be an increase in abuse on Twitter with the number of workers leaving.
‘I love the platform and I really enjoyed working at the company and trying to make it better. And I’m just really fearful of what’s going to slip through the cracks,’ she said.
Newton said that those employees impacted are involved in Twitter’s marketing, content moderation, and real estate sectors.
‘Contractors aren’t being notified at all, they’re just losing access to Slack and email,’ Newton wrote on Twitter. ‘Managers figured it out when their workers just disappeared from the system. They heard nothing from their leaders.’
A Twitter manager wrote on the company’s Slack site that a contractor was working on a child safety workflow when they got locked out without warning, according to Newton.
One contractor said they learned they were fired from Newton’s tweets reporting the mass firing.
‘I just learned I was laid off by reading your tweets and then trying to log in on slack and email and realized it was all gone,’ the contractor wrote.
Ingle, a data scientist, said she worked on the data and monitoring arm of Twitter’s civic integrity team. Her job involved writing algorithms to find political misinformation on the platform in countries such as the U.S., Brazil, Japan, Argentina and elsewhere.
Ingle said she was ‘pretty sure I was done for’ when she couldn’t access her work email Saturday. The notification from the contracting company she’d been hired by came two hours later.
‘I’ll just be putting my resumes out there and talking to people,’ she said. ‘I have two children. And I’m worried about being able to give them a nice Christmas, you know, and just mundane things like that, that are important. I just think it´s particularly heartless to do this at this time.’
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