Jackson asks for racial breakdown of Twitter layoffs
Concerned that high percentage of blacks, Latinos were affected
SAN FRANCIS CO The Rev. Jesse Jackson says he has “grave concerns” that the recent layoffs at Twitter disproportionately affected African Americans and Hispanics, and he has asked CEO Jack Dorsey to publicly release “a specific accounting.”
In a letter to Dorsey, Jackson said the San Francisco social media company should publicly disclose the number and percentage of underrepresented minorities who lost their jobs at Twitter in the downsizing last month.
“Twitter already has an appallingly low number and percentage of African Americans and Latinos working at the company, around 60 total in the workforce and zero in your boardroom and c-suite leadership,” Jackson wrote to Dorsey. “We are concerned that a disproportionate number and percentage of blacks and Latinos were adversely affected in your recent layoffs.”
Janet Van Huysse, Twitter’s vice president of diversity and inclusion, told Jackson underrepresented minorities were not disproportionately affected in the layoffs but did not provide specifics, Jackson said in an interview.
Jackson says he has again asked Twitter to release the breakdown. “We will insist on it,” Jackson said. “So far, Twitter has been the most resistant to give us their data, and then they are giving us resistance to giving us this additional data.”
Twitter spokeswoman Natalie Miyake said in a statement that Twitter’s restructuring “did not adversely impact underrepresented groups.”
“We will continue our diversity efforts and believe we are on track to achieve our 2016 representation goals,” Miyake said.
The demand from Jackson comes one day after African-American engineer Leslie Miley, who was let go by Twitter in October, wrote a Medium post blasting Twitter’s commitment to diversity.
Blacks, Hispanics and Asian Americans account for 41% of U.S. users, making Twitter more racially diverse than any other social network, including Facebook. As a publicly traded company, Twitter has capitalized on the diversity of its users to attract advertising from major brands that want to target those groups.
Twitter is especially popular among African Americans. More than a quarter of black Internet users in the U.S. are on Twitter, a rate higher than other ethnic groups, according to a 2013 study by the Pew Research Center. And “Black Twitter” — the flow of conversation about issues that matter to this online community — has become a cultural force capable of influencing the national dialogue and the course of events.
Dorsey has spoken frequently of the social media-fueled power of the Black Lives Matter movement.