Watchdog: X owner cut 30% of trust, safety staff

MELBOURNE, Australia — X Corp., the owner of the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, has slashed its global trust and safety staff by 30%, including an 80% reduction in the number of safety engineers since billionaire Elon Musk took over in 2022, Australia’s online safety watchdog said Thursday.

Australia’s eSafety Commission, which describes itself as the world’s first government agency dedicated to keeping people safer online, released summaries of answers that X provided to questions about how it enforced policies about hateful conduct.

The commission said in a statement that while the company had previously given estimates of the reduction in staffing, the answers were the first specific figures on where staff reductions had been made that became public.

Since the day before Musk bought control of San Francisco-based Twitter on Oct. 28, 2022, until a reporting period imposed by the commission closed May 31, 2023, trust and safety staff globally had been reduced from 4,062 to 2,849 employees and contractors. That reduction is 30% globally and 45% of those in the Asia-Pacific region.

Engineers focused on trust and safety issues at X had been reduced from 279 globally to 55, a fall of 80%. Full-time employee content moderators had been reduced 52%, from 107 to 51. Content moderators employed on contract fell 12%, from 2,613 to 2,305.

Julie Inman Grant, the eSafety commissioner, said while X could not be forced to lift user safety standards, its failure to do so risked its brand reputation and advertising revenue.

X did not immediately respond Wednesday to a request for comment.