|
© |
They fired her with a text message. Melissa Ingle is simply no longer able to access the programs she needs to do her Twitter work. It quickly becomes clear to her that her job at the company is done. “It was all so humiliating and distant,” the woman said, quoted by “Deutsche Welle”.
The official letter about the firing didn’t arrive until two days later, via email.
“Right now, I’m busy all day looking for a new job,” says the until recently employee at Elon Musk’s company. It’s extremely difficult to find a job right now, he says, because the market is currently saturated with highly skilled people. And without work it is impossible to continue living in such an expensive city as San Francisco.
Melissa Ingle is a data analyst by profession, and on Twitter for more than a year she has been working in the group of moderators who monitor published content. That is, she monitors tweets with problematic content.
“We have developed and maintained the algorithms that automatically recognize tweets with false political information,” explains the fired woman.
According to her, since Elon Musk bought Twitter, fake news has multiplied – and not only that. Compared to the previous time, complaints about hate speech and offensive tweets have doubled. Ingle believes the reason lies in the fact that many employees have been made redundant.
And he explains why: an average of 37.5 million tweets appear on Twitter per hour. The monitoring of violations such as hate speech, fake news or child pornography is done with the help of artificial intelligence and algorithms, simply because humans would not be able to monitor this gigantic flow on their own.
But algorithms are not omnipotent. “They don’t work perfectly. They can’t recognize, for example, parody or satire,” Ingle explains. That’s why we need living people who take care of the algorithms, improve them, update them, even when the laws change. Because algorithms only know what they’ve been “taught” to do. Today, however, Twitter is severely short of people to check critical tweets, says the fired employee.
In a WhatsApp group, he keeps in touch with former and current employees of the company. Elon Musk had announced the creation of a Content Moderation Council that would include representatives of various political lines, but apparently such a council does not exist yet, says Ingle. “People who have worked or are still working in this field have not heard of it.”
“Employee morale is at its lowest”
Melissa Ingle was not hired under a normal employment contract, but as a subcontracted employee through an intermediary company. You spoke to ARD reporters in California precisely because you didn’t sign the otherwise usual non-disclosure agreement. However, for the same reason, she has not received any compensation.
“I am very concerned and want the public to know what is happening on Twitter right now,” Melissa says. According to her, employee morale has literally collapsed. Elon Musk, for example, ordered various office chatrooms to be searched, and those who criticized him had to go.
Melissa Ingle does not know if Twitter will survive in the hands of Musk: “However, in any case, the platform can not function as a healthy organism, at least not with this team that currently moderates the content.”
