Sources detail how Twitter's health team, once tasked with fostering civil conversations, was cut from 15 full-time staff to two amid the Musk acquisition chaos
Just when you think things couldn't get any crazier at Twitter … Casey Newton / Platformer : Sources detail how Twitter's health team, tasked with fostering civil conversations, went from 15 full-time staffers down to two amid the Musk acquisition chaos Tweets: Casey Newton / @caseynewton : NEW: How a Twitter plan to counter extremism fell apart. A research team was midway through a project to help troubled users. Then Elon Musk bought the company @ZoeSchiffer and me: https://www.theverge.com/... @jgo4justice : The Musk deal might not even go through but he's been bad for Twitter nonetheless, destabilizing teams that we need to protect civic integrity at a time when we need them most. https://www.theverge.com/... Tom Gara / @tomgara : “The chaos of the deal made me realize that I didn't want to work for a private, Musk-owned Twitter, but also that I didn't want to work for a public, not-Musk-owned Twitter,” a former employee says. “I just no longer wanted to work for Twitter” https://www.theverge.com/... Brandon / @bborrman : Full appreciation of how much the people at Twitter have done to make this place better won't come until the market kills off all their efforts. It's a real tragedy. https://twitter.com/... Daniel Kelley / @danieljkelley : This anonymous Twitter employee sums it up nicely: “Selling the company to Elon Musk was icing on the cake of a much longer track record of decisions by higher ups in the company showing safety wasn't prioritized.” https://twitter.com/... Nilay Patel / @reckless : Twitter scoop from @ZoeSchiffer and @CaseyNewton: the turmoil of the Elon deal has led to huge attrition on the team that researches how to keep people safe on the platform, with some of the rest being told to focus on bots and spam https://www.theverge.com/... @zoeschiffer : Earlier this year, Twitter was rolling out a new plan to fight extremism. Then Elon Musk said he was buying the company. Now the project has stalled and numerous health researchers have quit. What happened? https://twitter.com/... Casey Newton / @caseynewton : As a result, this effort to prevent the growth of incels, anti-vaxxers and other harmful actors on the platform have stalled. It's a concrete example of how the turmoil of 2022 is hurting some of Twitter's most important teams Casey Newton / @caseynewton : Twitter had been working on Redirect, an effort to steer users away from extremism content on the platform. But it cut funding earlier this year, and the people working on civil conversations dropped from 15 to two