Elon Musk’s X lays off 1,000 employees from its safety team: Report

Elon Musk’s X has fired 1,000 employees from its ‘safety’ staff, reported AFP citing Australia’s online watchdog. As per the report, this team was responsible for stopping abusive content online. The authority revealed that these “deep cuts” and reinstatement of thousands of banned accounts had created “perfect storm” for the spread of harmful content.  

Recently, the regulator in recent months started scrutinising X because of the spike in “toxicity and hate” on the microblogging platform. Under the Online Safety Act, the regulator obtained the breakdown of software engineers, content moderators and other safety staff members working at X.

As per the data, 1,213 specialist “trust and safety staff”, including contractors, had left X since it was acquired by Musk in October 2022. Out of these 80 per cent were software engineers that were focused on “trust and safety issues”.

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In other news, Google has announced to hundreds of job cuts in the company recently. This fresh wave of layoff has affected the Google Assistant, hardware and engineering teams. This was done to lower expenses as the company plans to shift its focus on artificial intelligence.

In a statement, a Google spokesperson explained, “In the latter half of 2023, several of our teams changed to improve efficiency and better align resources with our top product priorities. Some teams are still implementing these organizational changes, which unfortunately involve job cuts worldwide.”

Not just Google, Amazon has also fired employees from its Prime Video and MGM Studio team. The company stated that it will now focus on content and product initiatives that deliver the most impact while discontinuing investments in certain areas.

Meta has also made 60 jobs cuts across the Instagram staff, especially technical program managers (TPM). A report by Blind reveals that the employees that are handed the pink slips have an option to reapply and undergo a new interview process to secure their positions. However, whoever is not able to qualify this interview will be considered fired and will have to leave in March this year.

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Google lays off hundreds of employees to reduce expenses; check details

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