Sarah T. RobertsAround 3,000+ contractor employees of Twitter were canned last night (totally normal thing to do, btw). How does Twitter have so many contractors? This is where the CONTENT MODERATOR numbers are hidden. From an ex-colleague I’ll not name: “of the 3,000+ contractors let go last night, I believe that it included a SIGNIFICANT portion of the content moderation workforce.”
They are called “agents” at Twitter. There are at least four third-party companies who sourced and managed them. As with most companies in the space, Twitter’s official FTE numbers of around 7500 employees did NOT count the contractors. This is where ALL OF THESE FIRMS stash their moderators. Facebook has easily has 20-25,000 of them at any given time. Twitter had at least 3,000.
ꙮ ⚗️ pnathan ⚗️ ꙮ@ubiquity75 contractors are hired in part to ensure they can be fired fast. It all keeps the headcount off the books formally. Real iffy biz practice.
Nick Bax@pnathan @ubiquity75 agreed. AFAIK it’s to keep the unemployment insurance costs low for their higher paid direct hire workforce. It’s crap.
Howard Cheng@ubiquity75 Shocking to read, but also makes so much sense in light of Musk's drive to make Twitter seemingly a free speech absolutist's paradise.
Andromeda Yelton@ubiquity75 well that’ll go great
Yeri@ubiquity75 google has ~150.000 vendors, contractors and temps.
Maj 🇨🇦@ubiquity75 Man, that's a lot of people having a very shitty Sunday morning. Probably some tough conversations happening around the breakfast table...
Ryan Schultz@ubiquity75 I'm kinda surprised that they weren't let go when Musk fired half Twitter's employees. Perhaps Elon fired the people who were responsible for hiring the contractors, and nobody figured it out until yesterday?
No Escape from Social Media@ubiquity75 very cool, we love to see it*
*we do not
Mike Taylor 🦕Every day, another utterly boneheaded move by Elon Musk -- yesterday, sacking most of the content moderation workforce.
Seriously: if his intention had been to destroy Twitter, could have done more to bring it about?
Frank Bennett 🇯🇵@ubiquity75 Aaaand today Elon "tweets" that "Twitter is feeling increasingly alive." He has also posted that Twitter is "at its core" driven by its technology, and not by human resources. The plan seems to be to make human intervention in content moderation unnecessary, and his massive following of childish sycophants heartily agree.
Jon Rodman@ubiquity75 things about to get much worse in 🐦 land then. Pleased I deactivated my account.
Michael Dempster