{"id":467701,"date":"2022-11-05T08:00:19","date_gmt":"2022-11-05T06:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=467701"},"modified":"2022-11-05T08:12:03","modified_gmt":"2022-11-05T06:12:03","slug":"twitter-layoffs-begin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/business\/467701-twitter-layoffs-begin.html","title":{"rendered":"Twitter layoffs begin"},"content":{"rendered":"

The emails started arriving in Twitter Inc. employees\u2019 personal inboxes in the early morning hours Friday: \u201cToday is your last working day at the company,\u201d the message read.<\/p>\n

As people frantically refreshed their work and personal accounts to learn their fate, new owner Elon Musk sought to defend his decision to terminate thousands of jobs.<\/p>\n

He\u00a0said<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0the company had experienced a \u201cmassive drop in revenue\u201d due to a flight of advertisers from the social network.<\/p>\n

It was an eventful week for Twitter. Since his takeover last week, Musk has assembled a transition team of close confidants to help identify deep cost cuts and quick ways to jump-start revenue.<\/p>\n

The global workforce reductions are expected to affect 3,700 jobs \u2014 about half of the company.<\/p>\n

Some outgoing staff said they will be paid at least two months of severance.<\/p>\n

Musk is also looking for places to cut within Twitter\u2019s technical infrastructure.<\/p>\n

At the same time, remaining employees are racing to develop new tools that can be sold to users.<\/p>\n

The most urgent is a revised subscription program that will, among other perks, let anyone get a blue badge with a check mark next to their name on the site if they pay $8 a month.<\/p>\n

Currently, the check marks are free, used as a designation for verified accounts of celebrities, politicians, journalists and other public figures to distinguish them from impostors.<\/p>\n

\n
\n

Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists.<\/p>\n

Extremely messed up! They\u2019re trying to destroy free speech in America.<\/p>\n

\u2014 Elon Musk (@elonmusk)\u00a0November 4, 2022<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

Musk\u2019s acquisition of Twitter saddled the money-losing business with a large pile of debt, and the billionaire has said they \u201cneed to pay the bills.\u201d<\/p>\n

The hastily arranged blue-check program, which could be released as soon as next week, was met with ire from popular users on Twitter.<\/p>\n

Musk and his transition team have responded derisively.<\/p>\n

\u201cYour feedback is appreciated, now pay $8,\u201d Musk\u00a0wrote<\/a><\/strong> in response to US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who criticised the idea of making people pay in the name of \u201cfree speech.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n
\n

Lmao at a billionaire earnestly trying to sell people on the idea that \u201cfree speech\u201d is actually a $8\/mo subscription plan<\/p>\n

\u2014 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC)\u00a0November 2, 2022<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

Twitter faces urgent matters besides cost-cutting and increasing cash flow.<\/p>\n

A major US election is on Tuesday, and Twitter employees said they were without access to essential tools for monitoring and removing political misinformation in the days following Musk\u2019s takeover.<\/p>\n

Musk\u00a0promised<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0civil rights leaders he would restore content moderation tools that had been blocked for some staff by the end of this week.<\/p>\n

Before Twitter began the mass terminations, employees preemptively\u00a0filed a class-action lawsuit<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0Thursday.<\/p>\n

They claimed the company was moving too quickly to dismiss without warning, in violation of federal and California law.<\/p>\n

When details of the layoffs were communicated Friday, the attorney leading the class-action suit, prominent labour lawyer Shannon Liss-Riordan, said she was pleased that Musk \u201cis making an effort to comply with the WARN Act\u201d by paying severance.<\/p>\n

Laws aside, Musk is looking to correct what he sees as a coddled workforce.<\/p>\n

He eliminated the company\u2019s\u00a0\u201cdays of rest\u201d policy<\/strong><\/a>,<\/strong> which had been introduced as a mental-health measure during the Covid-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n

The response to these moves from many employees in the UK was to join trade unions, an effort to better protect their employment rights ahead of the mass job cuts, said Mike Clancy, general secretary of the union Prospect.<\/p>\n

\u201cTwitter is treating its people appallingly,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Many workers turned to company Slack channels and public Twitter posts to say goodbye. They used blue heart and salute emojis to thank their colleagues.<\/p>\n

But they lacked official information about their next steps.<\/p>\n

At least two pregnant staffers who were laid off had no information about their medical benefits going forward, according to people familiar with the matter.<\/p>\n

Even the employees who survived the cuts were reeling from the way the process occurred.<\/p>\n

Some advertisers are wary of associating their brands with Twitter during a time of tumult.<\/p>\n

Audi, Pfizer Inc. and General Mills Inc. said they will temporarily pause spending on Twitter while they wait to see how it evolves under Musk\u2019s leadership.<\/p>\n

Though Musk pledged to reinstate worker access to content moderation tools this week, civil rights groups remain wary of his changes.<\/p>\n

A coalition called #StopToxicTwitter \u2014 made up of more than 60 advocacy organisations including the Anti-Defamation League and Accountable Tech \u2014 said on Friday it plans to escalate calls to Twitter advertisers telling them to stop buying ad space on the platform in the wake of Musk\u2019s sweeping layoffs.<\/p>\n

Jessica J. Gonz\u00e1lez, co-CEO of Free Press, part of the coalition, said the groups were stepping up their campaign in response to Musk\u2019s failure to uphold his commitment to take the measures that would prevent Twitter from becoming a superspreader of racism and disenfranchisement.<\/p>\n

On top of that, Musk is politically divisive, frequently promoting right-wing voices and sparring with the left.<\/p>\n

On Thursday night and early Friday morning, he was engaging on Twitter with someone who posted a meme making fun of Ocasio-Cortez and endorsed a message from the author Tom Fitton saying conservative speech is suppressed.<\/p>\n

Musk blamed \u201cactivist groups pressuring advertisers\u201d for a recent and swift decline in ad revenue.<\/p>\n

\u201cExtremely messed up!\u201d he wrote. \u201cThey\u2019re trying to destroy free speech in America.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now read: Amazon, Microsoft, and Google hiring in South Africa \u2014 including IT internships<\/a><\/h2>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As people frantically refreshed their work and personal accounts to learn their fate, new owner Elon Musk sought to defend his decision to terminate thousands of jobs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341034,"featured_media":467351,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[11373,12083,35065,405],"class_list":["post-467701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","tag-elon-musk","tag-job-cuts","tag-tech-jobs","tag-twitter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467701"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341034"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=467701"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467701\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":467705,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467701\/revisions\/467705"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/467351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=467701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=467701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=467701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}