Illustration: Natalie Peeples/Axios
After laying off half its staff earlier this month, twitter Sources confirmed to Axios that the extensive contract staff began to be eliminated on Saturday.
Why is it important?: Like many companies, Twitter’s staff consists of a mix of full-time employees and third-party contract workers.
Details: Twitter has cut an unspecified number of contractors in various areas, including content moderationsources confirmed to Axios.
- After Twitter laid off half its staff earlier this month, the status of many contractors was uncertain, with some not even knowing who to report to as colleagues within the company were laid off.
- Sources told Axios that now some are worried about their final paychecks because their teams no longer have full-time Twitter employees to check in on their time cards.
- The contractor was laid off mentioned earlier Saturday by Casey Newton of Platformer.
Between the lines: In at least some, if not all, cases, employees did not receive direct communication from Twitter that they were terminated.
- Instead, they learned by seeing their access to Twitter’s computer systems shut down.
- This parallels the scene where full-time employees found out they lost their jobs because they lost access to email and other corporate computing systems overnight on Thursday, not from a promised email on Friday.
- Twitter has since sought to rehire some of its full-time employees after projects became critical to existing projects, including new features that were a priority for the company.
- And some contractors have worried about getting paid for the past two weeks, as a number of contractors have joined teams at Twitter that don’t have full-time employees and won’t let anyone sign their time cards, sources told Axios.
Big picture: Twitter has been in turmoil ever since Elon Musk captured, captured after launch with products and features.
- This includes a new version of the Twitter Blue subscription service, which allows subscribers to put the same blue checkmark on the verified accounts of politicians, journalists, government agencies and celebrities.
- Twitter suspended it earlier this week after impersonators used the subscription service to impersonate various brands, famous athletes and politicians.
What they say: Melissa Ingle is a San Francisco-based content moderator specializing in political disinformation among those cut off🇧🇷
- Ingle, who has two master’s degrees and teaches data science skills, said she was surprised by the move and worried about providing for her family with the holidays coming up.
- “I’m the kind of person you want in your company,” Axios said. “People shouldn’t be treated like that.”
- Twitter has laid off all of its communications staff, and an email to the company’s press account was not immediately returned.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated with additional details about the contractors’ concerns.
