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"Elon laid off 75% of the moderation team." Did he? According to this BBC article[1], "Yoel Roth, Twitter's Head of Safety & Integrity, said that most of the

"Elon laid off 75% of the moderation team." Did he? According to this BBC article[1], "Yoel Roth, Twitter's Head of Safety & Integrity, said that most of the more than 2,000 content moderators working on "front-line review" were not impacted" by the firings. More details here[2], where Roth says "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." [1] - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-63524219 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-63524219 [2] - https://nitter.net/yoyoel/status/1588657229628321792 https://nitter.net/yoyoel/status/1588657229628321792

snoopy_telex 4y ago
Wait. So of the ~3500 employees left at the company, 2000 are content moderators?!
- detaro 4y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if a good chunk of them aren't Twitter employees, but subcontractors somewhere. At least that's what plenty other social media sites do.
- majewsky 4y ago
  Well yeah, what else about Twitter would require that much raw manpower?
  - Kye 4y ago
    Ad sales, advertising relationship management, ad analytics for those relationships.
- peanuty1 4y ago
  Isn't content moderation the biggest challenge at Twitter?
- pessimizer 4y ago
  We've created a new class, of tens of thousands of people all over the world, who spend all day censoring content in realtime. Eventually there will be giant censorship service corporations lobbying government for more restrictions on speech, and for them to be more complicated and confusing (to make them more difficult to in-house.)
  - HillRat 4y ago
    No, we’ve created a class of global citizens whose only job is to handle, without protection, the torrent of psychological toxic waste we create every single second of the day. The vast majority of the work they do is to act as an ablative shield for all the horrors humanity can pour into the internet, and they do it for a fraction of the remuneration of a single social media company SWE, even when they’re onshored. What the rest of us see as “censorship” is the tip of the iceberg — the stuff that isn’t so horrid as to get weeded out immediately and so ends up in the “user-initiated moderation” category. Everything below that, if we weren’t destroying people’s minds and emotional well-being for outsourced pennies on the hour, would make the Internet so radioactive for every single user that an open WiFi point would be considered a crime against humanity.
sg47 4y ago
it's outsourced to Infosys or TCS
- disgruntledphd2 4y ago
  Accenture, actually.
Yoric 4y ago
I assume we'll know final numbers once the dust settles, but that sounds not nearly as bad as assumed. However, my personal experience of Twitter suggests that it remains an open air sewer, which tends to indicate that the content moderation team was already severely under-staffed. I suspect that it's even more true for non-English language. So, even if only 15% of the content moderators have been laid off, this doesn't bode well for the future health of conversations on the platform. Regardless, thanks for the sources! update: Reading through the source once again, 15% of the T&S team was laid off but we don't have numbers for the number of content moderators who were laid off. I had assumed that content moderators were part of the T&S team, but that may not be true.
- tazjin 4y ago
  > which tends to indicate that the content moderation team was already severely under-staffed Or that they were moderating the wrong thing.
  - Yoric 4y ago
    Good point.
- pyuser583 4y ago
  Twitter was an open air sewer for me until I learned to love the block/use feature. Now it’s all good. I’m pretty sure Twitter deprioritizes tweets from accounts similar to ones you’ve blocked.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

snoopy_telex 4y ago

Wait. So of the ~3500 employees left at the company, 2000 are content moderators?!

detaro 4y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if a good chunk of them aren't Twitter employees, but subcontractors somewhere. At least that's what plenty other social media sites do.
majewsky 4y ago
Well yeah, what else about Twitter would require that much raw manpower?
- Kye 4y ago
  Ad sales, advertising relationship management, ad analytics for those relationships.
peanuty1 4y ago
Isn't content moderation the biggest challenge at Twitter?
pessimizer 4y ago
We've created a new class, of tens of thousands of people all over the world, who spend all day censoring content in realtime. Eventually there will be giant censorship service corporations lobbying government for more restrictions on speech, and for them to be more complicated and confusing (to make them more difficult to in-house.)
- HillRat 4y ago
  No, we’ve created a class of global citizens whose only job is to handle, without protection, the torrent of psychological toxic waste we create every single second of the day. The vast majority of the work they do is to act as an ablative shield for all the horrors humanity can pour into the internet, and they do it for a fraction of the remuneration of a single social media company SWE, even when they’re onshored. What the rest of us see as “censorship” is the tip of the iceberg — the stuff that isn’t so horrid as to get weeded out immediately and so ends up in the “user-initiated moderation” category. Everything below that, if we weren’t destroying people’s minds and emotional well-being for outsourced pennies on the hour, would make the Internet so radioactive for every single user that an open WiFi point would be considered a crime against humanity.

sg47 4y ago

it's outsourced to Infosys or TCS

disgruntledphd2 4y ago
Accenture, actually.

Yoric 4y ago

I assume we'll know final numbers once the dust settles, but that sounds not nearly as bad as assumed. However, my personal experience of Twitter suggests that it remains an open air sewer, which tends to indicate that the content moderation team was already severely under-staffed. I suspect that it's even more true for non-English language. So, even if only 15% of the content moderators have been laid off, this doesn't bode well for the future health of conversations on the platform. Regardless, thanks for the sources! update: Reading through the source once again, 15% of the T&S team was laid off but we don't have numbers for the number of content moderators who were laid off. I had assumed that content moderators were part of the T&S team, but that may not be true.

tazjin 4y ago
> which tends to indicate that the content moderation team was already severely under-staffed Or that they were moderating the wrong thing.
- Yoric 4y ago
  Good point.
pyuser583 4y ago
Twitter was an open air sewer for me until I learned to love the block/use feature. Now it’s all good. I’m pretty sure Twitter deprioritizes tweets from accounts similar to ones you’ve blocked.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]