Australia’s online safety commissioner said on Thursday (Jan 11) that X Corp. has slashed global trust and safety staff by 30 per cent since billionaire Elon Musk took over in 2022, Forbes reported.
X Corp. is the owner of the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. The company has also reduced 80 per cent of its staff when it comes to the number of safety engineers.
Australia’s eSafety Commission calls itself the world’s first government organisation committed to keeping people safe online.
The commission has revealed summaries of X’s responses to queries about how its hateful conduct standards were enforced.
Using Australia’s Online Safety Act to demand, the commissioner basically asked X to answer how it is keeping the users safe.
The company said that before the acquisition in October 2022, it had 279 engineers worldwide focused on trust and safety. By the end of May 2023, that number had reduced to 55. Meanwhile, the trust and safety team of 4,062 was cut down to 2,849.
The content moderation team was cut in half, from 107 down to 51, though most of X’s moderators are contractors. In October 2022, the company had 2,613 hired moderators, but that number had dropped to 2,305 by May 2023.
SpaceX illegally fired workers critical of Elon Musk
Meanwhile, rocket and satellite maker SpaceX, another company owned by Musk, was accused by a US labour agency of unlawfully firing eight employees for circulating a letter calling founder and CEO Elon Musk a “distraction and embarrassment”.
A regional official with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) issued a complaint claiming SpaceX violated the workers’ rights under federal labour law to band together and advocate for better working conditions.
The letter sent to SpaceX executives in June 2022 focused on a series of tweets Musk had made since 2020, many of which were sexually suggestive. The employees claimed Musk’s statements did not align with the company’s policies on diversity and workplace misconduct and called on SpaceX to condemn them.
