Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover Set Off a Race to the Bottom

But for years, nationalist unit from authorities officials, civilian society, and the media pushed tech companies to put successful teams and tools that could astatine slightest somewhat code issues of hatred code oregon misinformation connected their platforms, truthful they could accidental they were making a bully religion effort to woody with the issue.

Musk’s acquisition of Twitter signaled a change, according to six erstwhile spot and information employees from Twitter and Meta.

When Musk took implicit Twitter successful October 2022, helium rapidly fired much than 50 percent of the company’s workers, including almost each of the company’s spot and information and argumentation staff—the radical tasked with creating and enforcing the platform’s policies astir things similar hatred speech, convulsive content, conspiracy theories, and mis- and disinformation. Since then, Meta, Google, Amazon, and Discord person each made cuts to spot and information staff.

Shortly aft Musk purged Twitter of its spot and information teams, different companies began layoffs. In November 2022, Meta laid disconnected 11,000 employees, including galore spot and information employees. In January 2023, Google followed suit, axing 12,000 people. Earlier this year, Twitch, which is owned by Amazon, disbanded its Safety Advisory Council.

“I deliberation that Elon truly opened the floodgates,” says 1 erstwhile Meta employee. “So past different tech brands were like, ‘We tin bash that too, due to the fact that we won't beryllium the achromatic sheep for it.’”

Meta spokesperson Corey Chambliss tells WIRED that the institution has “40,000 radical globally moving connected information and security—more than during the 2020 cycle, erstwhile we had a planetary squad of 35,000 radical moving successful this area,” though helium did not code however galore of those radical are unit versus outsourced workers.

Musk’s abrupt firings made it truthful that “anybody other could travel on and nicely occurrence their teams and springiness them severance and it was nicer. Better,” says a erstwhile Twitter worker who was fired by Musk.

After Musk fired the spot and information staff, experts warned that this cut, coupled with Musk’s “free code absolutism,” would let toxic contented to flood the level and yet origin an exodus of users and advertisers, starring to Twitter’s eventual demise. Hate code and misinformation did increase and advertisers did propulsion their dollars. Last year, X fired members of what remained of its elections team. Around the aforesaid time, Musk posted connected X, saying, “Oh you mean the ‘Election Integrity’ Team that was undermining predetermination integrity? Yeah, they’re gone.”