But for years, public pressure from government officials, civil society, and the media pushed tech companies to invest in teams and tools that could at least somewhat address issues of hate speech or misinformation on their platforms, so they could say they were making a good faith effort to deal with the issue.
Musk’s purchase of Twitter signaled a change, according to six former trust and safety employees from Twitter and Meta.
When Musk took over Twitter in October 2022, he quickly fired more than 50 percent of the company’s workers, including almost all of the company’s trust and safety and policy staff—the people tasked with creating and enforcing the platform’s policies around things like hate speech, violent content, conspiracy theories, and mis- and disinformation. Since then, Meta, Google, Amazon, and Discord have all made cuts to trust and safety staff.
Shortly after Musk purged Twitter of its trust and safety teams, other companies began layoffs. In November 2022, Meta laid off 11,000 employees, including many trust and safety 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 think that Elon really opened the floodgates,” says one former Meta employee. “So then other tech brands were like, ‘We can do that too, because we won’t be the black sheep for it.’”
Meta spokesperson Corey Chambliss tells WIRED that the company has “40,000 people globally working on safety and security—more than during the 2020 cycle, when we had a global team of 35,000 people working in this area,” though he did not address how many of those people are staff versus outsourced workers.
Musk’s sudden firings made it so that “anybody else could come along and nicely fire their teams and give them severance and it was nicer. Better,” says a former Twitter employee who was fired by Musk.
After Musk fired the trust and safety staff, experts warned that this cut, coupled with Musk’s “free speech absolutism,” would allow toxic content to flood the platform and ultimately cause an exodus of users and advertisers, leading to Twitter’s eventual demise. Hate speech and misinformation did increase and advertisers did pull their dollars. Last year, X fired members of what remained of its elections team. Around the same time, Musk posted on X, saying, “Oh you mean the ‘Election Integrity’ Team that was undermining election integrity? Yeah, they’re gone.”
