Published , by Sam Chandler
Published , by Sam Chandler
It looks like Twitter is imploding. While Musk claims usage is up and the app “isn’t boring!”, several employees have resigned from the company. The latest to dive off the sinking ship is Yoel Roth, who was the Head of Trust and Safety at Twitter.
On November 10, 2022, Cat Zakrzewski of Washington Post noted that Twitter Head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth had departed the social media platform. Roth’s Twitter profile has since been updated to reflect his former position.
It was just yesterday that Elon Musk was retweeting the words of Roth who was speaking about the team’s efforts to “combat hateful conduct”. Roth’s tweets offered up information noting that the team has managed to curb the recent surge in hate speech. More than that, the changes have seen said harmful content reduced by roughly 95 percent in Search compared to prior baseline levels. This was seemingly an early start on Musk’s plans to establish a Twitter content moderation council.
Things seem to be spiralling out of control over at Twitter HQ. The company has seen resignations from the CISO and other top security executives, which Zakrzewski notes has attracted scrutiny in Europe. Musk has also told staff that bankruptcy isn’t out of the question and the new Official verification has been switched off and now seemingly back on.
Last Friday, Musk started dumping shares of Tesla which ultimately totalled nearly $4 billion, presumably to fund his $44 billion purchase of Twitter. In a further bid to make ends meet, Twitter has introduced a new $8/month subscription model for Twitter Blue, giving paying customers a verification checkmark, which has in turn allowed users to create parody accounts of Elon Musk – which he promptly banned. Reports also indicate that Musk plans to cut $1 billion in infrastructure costs.
All of this has taken place over the last two weeks. We’ll be sure to keep you up to date on this ever-evolving situation.