Twitter Farce Continues As Managers Ask Fired Employees To Come Back, Please

Twitter Farce Continues As Managers Ask Fired Employees To Come Back, Please
B&T Magazine
By B&T Magazine
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Twitter is getting in touch with “dozens” of previously fired employees and asking them to return to their jobs, realising that they are, in fact, important.

Two people familiar with the redundancies and the re-hirings said that some of the employees were laid off by mistake. Other employees were let go before management realised that their work and experience would be helpful for building the features that new CEO Elon Musk thinks are important.

Twitter Australia has been left “a shell of its former self,” according to The Sydney Morning Herald. Staff in the government relations, communications, marketing, and news curation divisions were almost entirely laid off. The sales team, which brings advertisers on board, was least affected.

“The approach of culling employees who have particular expertise in trust and safety functions, with intimate knowledge of how the platform’s policies and tools work, potentially undermines the company’s ability to combat abuse, misinformation and harms in the future,” said Australian eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant, who once headed public policy for Twitter in the region.

Twitter’s Australian communications team did not respond to requests for comment and emails to their former addresses bounced, according to SMH. At least one Twitter government affairs staffer resigned at around the same time as the redundancies were rolled out.

Twitter cut almost half of its workforce, amounting to around 3,700 people, via email on Friday as a way to cut costs following Musk’s acquisition. Many employees, however, were not told with many learning of their redundancy after losing access to their company email and Slack accounts.

Musk tweeted on Friday that there was “no other choice” but to start making staff redundant when the site was losing more than US$4 million per day.

However, with advertisers reportedly pulling their spend — due to wanting to crush free speech, according to Musk — and plans to roll out Twitter Blue’s US$8 per month account verification, it seems as though Musk might be left looking at an even greater cash shortfall.

Musk also announced that any accounts — verified or otherwise — that are “engaging in impersonation” will be permanently banned. That is unless they “clearly” specify ‘parody’.

The toys-out-of-the-pram moment from the new CEO seems to have followed a raft of verified users impersonating Musk himself for humorous effect, even after Musk announced that “comedy is now legal” on Twitter following his takeover.

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