Late Friday, the Head of Safety and Integrity at Twitter, Yoel Roth, tweeted and appears to have confirmed that at least 50% of the workforce has been impacted by the company-wide mass job layoffs. In addition, he addressed rumors concerning the social media platform’s content control tools, which he asserts are still in existence.
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and self-described “Complaint Hotline Operator” on the microblogging site, addressed the job layoffs in the meanwhile and stated in a tweet that “sadly there is no choice when the firm is losing over $4M/day.” He continued by saying that three months of severance pay—50% more than what was legally required—was offered to everyone who had been sacked.
This came a few days after Musk assumed control of the microblogging service. Earlier, Musk had stated that the company was seeing a “huge” decline in revenue, which he attributed to “activist groups” that are ostensibly pressing the advertisers. Almost 90% of Twitter’s income comes from advertisements.
Before the US midterm elections, there will be a wave of mass job layoffs, raising questions about how well the country will be able to combat misinformation. Thousands of Twitter employees across divisions, including marketing, engineering, and content curation, have lost their jobs, as various media stories have revealed.
The psychological cost of losing your job
According to the Washington Post, Twitter cutbacks are likely to have an emotional cost. According to numerous studies, persons who lose their jobs are more likely to suffer from worse health and higher levels of stress. Anxiety and depression are widespread. Losing a job occasionally triggers drug usage and suicidal thoughts. Even the anxiety of upcoming layoffs can be taxing. Mass layoffs were linked in one study to smaller baby birthweights. When layoffs happened later in a woman’s pregnancy, the effect was strongest. The impact was also felt one to four months prior to the announcement of layoffs, apparently because people were aware that employment cuts would be made.
Twitter offices had also been closed during this period, and badge access had been revoked. Several stories of employees being locked out of their laptops, work Gmail accounts, and Slack (a messaging software) accounts surfaced early on Friday. The job layoffs follow Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of the social networking site, which he is apparently working to turn a profit on.
