Elon Musk is firing thousands of Twitter entrepreneurs responsible for fighting misinformation on the site

Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk is further wiping out the teams fighting misinformation on the social media platform as outsourced moderators found out over the weekend that they were out of a job.

The social media giant fired its contractors who track hate and other harmful content on Saturday. Some of the contractors said they didn’t realize they were fired until they couldn’t log into work on Saturday.

Musk’s move comes after Twitter fired many of its full-time employees via email on Nov. 4. About 4,400 of 5,500 contractors have been fired, according to Platformer News reporter Casey Newton.

Melissa Ingle, who worked at Twitter as a contractor for more than a year, was one of a number of contractors who said they were laid off without notice on Saturday. She said she is concerned there will be an increase in abuse on Twitter with the number of employees leaving.

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

Newton said the employees affected are involved in Twitter’s marketing, content moderation and real estate sectors.

“Contractors are not notified at all, they just lose access to Slack and email,” Newton wrote on Twitter. The managers figured it out when their employees just disappeared from the system. They heard nothing from their leaders.’

A Twitter executive posted on the company’s Slack site that a contractor was working on a child safety workflow when they were locked out without warning, according to Newton.

A contractor said they learned they were fired from Newton’s tweets reporting the mass shooting.

“I just found out I was fired by reading your tweets and then trying to log into slack and email and realized it was all gone,” the entrepreneur wrote.

Ingle, a data scientist, said she worked on the data and surveillance arm of Twitter’s citizen privacy team. Her job involved writing algorithms to find political disinformation on the platform in countries like the US, Brazil, Japan, Argentina and elsewhere.

Ingle said she was “pretty sure I was done for” when she couldn’t access her work email on Saturday. The message from the contracting company she had hired came two hours later.

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

Content moderation expert Sarah Roberts, an associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, tweeted on Sunday that about “3,000+ entrepreneur employees on Twitter were canned last night.”

Twitter has not said how many contract employees it cut. The company purged its communications department and has not responded to media requests for information since Musk took over.

Entrepreneurs also do other jobs to keep Twitter running,

“Not all entrepreneurs are agents of content moderation,” Roberts said. “Entrepreneurs fill many key roles within the company. But almost all moderation agents are entrepreneurs.

In the first days after Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in late October and fired its board and top executives, the billionaire Tesla CEO sought 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 our front. -line moderation staff who experience the least impact.’

Roth has since resigned from the company, joining an exodus of high-level executives tasked with protecting privacy, cybersecurity and regulatory compliance.