Wait. So of the ~3500 employees left at the company, 2000 are content moderators?!

I wouldn't be surprised if a good chunk of them aren't Twitter employees, but subcontractors somewhere. At least that's what plenty other social media sites do.

Well yeah, what else about Twitter would require that much raw manpower?

Ad sales, advertising relationship management, ad analytics for those relationships.

Isn't content moderation the biggest challenge at Twitter?

We've created a new class, of tens of thousands of people all over the world, who spend all day censoring content in realtime.

Eventually there will be giant censorship service corporations lobbying government for more restrictions on speech, and for them to be more complicated and confusing (to make them more difficult to in-house.)

No, we’ve created a class of global citizens whose only job is to handle, without protection, the torrent of psychological toxic waste we create every single second of the day. The vast majority of the work they do is to act as an ablative shield for all the horrors humanity can pour into the internet, and they do it for a fraction of the remuneration of a single social media company SWE, even when they’re onshored. What the rest of us see as “censorship” is the tip of the iceberg — the stuff that isn’t so horrid as to get weeded out immediately and so ends up in the “user-initiated moderation” category. Everything below that, if we weren’t destroying people’s minds and emotional well-being for outsourced pennies on the hour, would make the Internet so radioactive for every single user that an open WiFi point would be considered a crime against humanity.

it's outsourced to Infosys or TCS

Accenture, actually.

I assume we'll know final numbers once the dust settles, but that sounds not nearly as bad as assumed.

However, my personal experience of Twitter suggests that it remains an open air sewer, which tends to indicate that the content moderation team was already severely under-staffed. I suspect that it's even more true for non-English language.

So, even if only 15% of the content moderators have been laid off, this doesn't bode well for the future health of conversations on the platform.

Regardless, thanks for the sources!

update: Reading through the source once again, 15% of the T&S team was laid off but we don't have numbers for the number of content moderators who were laid off. I had assumed that content moderators were part of the T&S team, but that may not be true.

> which tends to indicate that the content moderation team was already severely under-staffed

Or that they were moderating the wrong thing.

Good point.

Twitter was an open air sewer for me until I learned to love the block/use feature. Now it’s all good.

I’m pretty sure Twitter deprioritizes tweets from accounts similar to ones you’ve blocked.