One in two fired: Musk fires Twitter employees via email

With a click in their inbox, Twitter’s 7,500 employees found out if they still had a job. Tech billionaire Elon Musk wants to save huge amounts of money. The big advertisers leave.

A week after being taken over by multibillionaire Elon Musk, the Twitter short message service began firing employees on a large scale. “About 50 percent” of the online platform’s roughly 7,500 employees are affected by the layoffs, according to a Twitter email to employees obtained by the AFP news agency.

Musk took over Twitter last Thursday for $ 44 billion and immediately fired the head of the short messaging service, Parag Agrawal, and other key managers. On Friday, several employees were informed of their dismissal. “In an effort to put Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of downsizing,” Twitter said in an email to employees the day before. This “will meet many people who have made a valuable contribution to Twitter”, but it is “sadly necessary to ensure the future success of the company”. Employees weren’t even supposed to show up at the office on Friday, the email said. “Our offices will be temporarily closed”.

Employees file a class action

The dismissed employees reacted with disappointment to their termination. “I woke up to the news that my time on Twitter had come to an end,” Twitter executive Michele Austin wrote on the short message service. “It breaks my heart. I don’t want to believe it.” Pregnant employee Rachel Bonn was also fired. She tweeted that hours after Elon Musk announced staff cuts, access to her work laptop was disabled.

A group of five previously fired employees promptly filed a class action lawsuit against Twitter. They accuse the company of not having given them 60 days notice of the redundancy fund, as required by law. One of the plaintiffs, who lives in California, said he was fired as early as November 1 without notice or severance pay.

Twitter has been struggling with economic problems for a long time. Among other things, the short messaging service had recorded losses in the first two quarters of the year. Musk complained about a “massive drop in revenue” on Friday, blaming “activist groups” for putting pressure on advertisers. “They are trying to destroy free speech in America.”

The big advertisers leave

US automaker General Motors had already stopped advertising on Twitter last week. More companies have recently followed, such as the food giant General Mills and the Volkswagen automaker. Volkswagen said the group has recommended brands like Audi and Skoda to stop their Twitter activities for the time being. Advertising is the main source of income for Twitter. The background to the ad block is the fear that Musk could drastically reduce the platform’s efforts to combat the spread of hate and misinformation messages.

The boss of electric car house Tesla and aerospace company SpaceX has announced, among other things, that he wants to release blocked user accounts such as that of former US President Donald Trump. Shortly before taking over Twitter, Musk tried to reassure advertisers that Twitter would not become a completely uncontrolled space. However, he himself fueled further fears for Twitter’s future development when he leaked a conspiracy theory on the platform about the husband of US politician Nancy Pelosi, who was badly injured in a brutal attack.

Worry about falling standards

Many observers also wonder how Twitter intends to moderate content now that the company is laying off half of its employees. Digital policy spokesperson for the SPD parliamentary group, Jens Zimmermann, explained that with half the workforce, Twitter would not be able to meet the legal requirements for moderation and handling of complaints in Europe. There are already numerous indications of a lack of action.

Under the title #StopToxicTwitterCoalition, more than 60 civil society organizations have called for a boycott of Twitter advertising. Critical moderation of Twitter content is no longer possible due to the wave of layoffs, according to an alliance statement. Hate speech is a serious problem, especially in view of the upcoming congressional elections in the United States.

Elon Musk accused activists of urging large companies to stop advertising on Twitter. “The activist group has managed to cause a huge slump in Twitter’s ad revenue and we’ve done our best to placate them and nothing is working,” Musk said.