Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has sparked a race to the bottom

When Musk took over Twitter in October 2022, he did it quickly laid off more than 50% of the company’s employeesinclusive almost all of the company’s trust and safety and policy staff— the people responsible for creating and enforcing the platform’s policies on things like hate speech, violent content, conspiracy theories, and misinformation and disinformation. Since then, Meta, Google, Amazon and Discord all made cuts to trust and safety staff.

Shortly after Musk stripped Twitter of its trust and security teams, other companies began layoffs. In November 2022, Meta laid off 11,000 employeesincluding many trust and safety employees. In January 2023, Google followed suit, removing 12,000 people. Earlier this year, Twitch, which is owned by Amazon, abolished its Safety Advisory Council.

“I think Elon really opened the floodgates,” says one former Meta employee. “So then other tech brands said, ‘We can do this too, because we’re not going to be the black sheep for this.’

Meta spokesman Corey Chambliss told WIRED that the company has “40,000 people globally working on safety and security — more than during the 2020 cycle, when we had a global team of 35,000 people working in this field,” though he did not address how many of those people are employees versus outsourced workers.

Musk’s sudden firings meant that “anyone else could come in and nicely fire their teams and give them a break and it was nicer. Better,” says a former Twitter employee who was fired by Musk.

After Musk fired trust and safety staff, experts warned that this cut, along with Musk’s “free speech absolutism,” would allow toxic content to flood the platform and ultimately cause an exodus of users and advertisers, leading to the eventual demise of Twitter. Hate speech and misinformation have increasedand advertisers got their dollars. Last year, X fired members of what remained of his election team. Around the same time, Musk posted on Xsaying, “Oh, you mean the Election Integrity team undermining election integrity?” Yes, they’re gone.”

But X is still alive.

Musk’s behavior, former employees say, acted as cover for other platforms that saw trust and job security as a burdensome cost. The work of teams focused on ad sales or user engagement drives growth and money for platforms. Trust and safety teams, former employees say, don’t. This makes them easy targets when companies tighten their belts.