Sympathy, and job offers, for Twitter’s misinformation experts
In the weeks since Elon Musk took over Twitter, dozens of people responsible for keeping dangerous or inaccurate material in check on the service have posted on LinkedIn that they resigned or lost their jobs. Their statements have drawn a flood of condolences — and attempts to recruit them.
Overtures arrived from rival tech services, retailers, consulting firms, government contractors and other organizations that want to use the former Twitter employees — and those recently let go by Meta and the payments platform Stripe — to track and combat false and toxic information on the internet.
Ania Smith, the CEO of TaskRabbit, the Ikeaowned marketplace for gig workers, commented on a former Twitter employee’s post this month that he should consider applying for a product director role, working in part on trust and safety tools.
“The war for talent has really been exceptional in the last 24 months in tech,” Ms. Smith said in an interview. “So when we see layoffs happening, whether it’s at Twitter or Meta or other companies, it’s definitely an opportunity to go after some of the very high-caliber talent we know they hire.”
She added that making users feel safe on the TaskRabbit platform was a key component of her company’s success.
The threats posed by conspiracy theories, misleadingly manipulated media, hate speech, child abuse, fraud and other online harms have been studied for years by academic
researchers, think tanks technology to help clients and government analysts. protect against disinformation But increasingly, companies campaigns. The 3in and outside the tech year-old company has 35 employees; industry see that abuse as a Ms. Kaplan said she potentially expensive liability, hoped to add 23 more by midespecially as more work 2023and was trying to recruit is conducted online and formerTwitter employees. regulators and clients push Disinformation,she said, for stronger guardrails. is like “the new malware”
On LinkedIn, under posts — a “digital reality that is eulogizing Twitter’s work ultimately going to impact on elections and content every company.” Clients moderation, comments promoted that once employed armed openings at TikTok guards to stand outside (threat researcher),data rooms, and then built DoorDash (community policy online firewalls to block manager) and Twitch hackers, are now calling (trust and safety incident firms like Alethea for manager). Managers at backup when, for example, other companies solicited coordinated influence campaigns suggestions for names to target public perception add to recruiting databases. of their brand and Google, Reddit, Microsoft, threaten their stock price, Discord and ActiveFence — Ms. Kaplan said. a 4-year-old company that “Anyone can do this — said last year that it had it’s fast, cheap and easy,” raised $100 million and that she said. “As more actors it could scan more than 3 get into the practice of weaponizing million sources of malicious information, either chatter in every language — for financial, reputational, alsohave job postings. political or ideological
The trust and safety field gain, you’re going to see barely existed a decade ago, more targets. This market and the talent pool is still is emerging because the small, said Lisa Kaplan, the threat has risen and the founder of Alethea, a company consequences have become that uses early detection more real.”