Musk fires outsourced moderators of Twitter content pursuing hate

Twitter and other major social media companies have relied heavily on contractors to track hate and other harmful content.

But many of these content watchdogs have now sprung, first as Twitter laid off much of its full-time employees via email on Nov. 4, and now as it looks to slash a untold number of contract jobs.

Melissa Ingle, who has worked as a contractor at Twitter for more than a year, was among several contractors who said they were terminated without notice Saturday. She said she was concerned that abuse on Twitter would increase as employees left the company.

“I love the platform and really enjoyed working at the company and trying to make it better. And I’m really afraid of what’s going to slip through the cracks,” she said on Sunday.

Ingle, a data scientist, said she works in the data and surveillance arm of Twitter’s civil integrity team. Their job was to write algorithms to find political misinformation on the platform in countries like the US, Brazil, Japan, Argentina and others.

Ingle said she was “pretty sure I was done” when she couldn’t access her work email on Saturday. Notification from the contractor that hired her came two hours later.

“I’m just going to put my resumes out there and talk to people,” she said. “I have two kids. And I’m worried about being able to give them a happy Christmas, you know, and such everyday things that are important. I just think it’s particularly heartless to do that at this time.”

Content moderation expert Sarah Roberts, an associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, tweeted Sunday that “about 3,000 contractors were fired from Twitter last night.”

Twitter didn’t say how many contract workers it cut. The company gutted its communications department and hasn’t responded to media requests for information since Musk acquired it.

Contractors also do other jobs to keep Twitter running,

“All contractors are not content moderation agents,” Roberts said. “Contractors fulfill many key roles within the company. But almost all moderation agents are contractors.”

In the early days after Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in late October and fired its board and top executives, Tesla’s billionaire CEO tried to reassure civil rights groups and advertisers that the platform could continue to quell hate.

That message was echoed by Twitter’s then head of content moderation, Yoel Roth, who tweeted that the November 4 layoffs only affected “15% of our Trust & Safety organization (as opposed to about 50% company-wide cuts) with ours Frontline moderators experience the least impact.”

Roth has since retired from the company, joining an exodus of senior executives tasked with privacy, cybersecurity and compliance.

Sign up for the Fortune Features Email list so you don’t miss our biggest features, exclusive interviews and investigations.