New boss Elon Musk fought to contain the chaos spreading on Twitter on Friday by summoning remaining engineers to its San Francisco headquarters and issuing new orders on content moderation.
Musk called on employees who actually write software at an afternoon summit, a day after a chaotic exodus of hundreds of employees who refused to sign a pledge to work longer hours furloughed them for three months. Was given Demanded to be taken on offer of salary of Rs. As they gathered, Musk tweeted that Twitter would stop amplifying hate speech and reinstate some controversial accounts, though not those of former President Donald Trump.
The series of emails and tweets underscored the personal nature of Musk’s oversight of the social media platform, which has 237 million daily users, many of whom tweeted their concerns in the past 24 hours, which some experts say is a Possible event, though not necessarily imminent.
Major companies have stopped advertising over Twitter’s financial pressure on debt-ridden ventures, and the re-introduction of payment verification icons has led to pranks and scams confusing loyal users.
Musk’s emails to engineers, however, suggest a realization that the worst was yet to come. The emails also went out to employees who walked out on Thursday instead of signing the pledge.
Musk asked all recipients to send screenshots of their most recent code and explain what it accomplished. While the initial email did not include any instructions for remote employees, it later stated that Musk would try to speak with them via video, but would only excuse employees if they had a family emergency or were physically unable to work. be unable to function properly. Could not work properly
Eight minutes later in a third email he asked the staff to fly to San Francisco, saying he would be in the office until midnight on Friday and return on Saturday morning. Yet another message an hour later stated that the flight would be appreciated but was not necessary.
Twitter has hit many engineers as of late to help better understand the tech stack after laying off nearly half of its more than 7,500 employees two weeks ago and then issued an ultimatum on Wednesday prompted a wave of departures.
Several key teams needed to maintain the site’s functioning were cut, with one engineer or none at all from Thursday’s departure, leaving the company partially on autopilot and bound for a late-morning accident was bound to be a possibility.
A former engineer who left the company this week said that although there were no reports of large-scale outages on Friday, every mistake in code and operations is now fatal. Leftovers have a tendency to overwork and are therefore more prone to making mistakes.
According to a department head who spoke on condition of anonymity, the team running the Gizmod service that powers and stores all the information in user profiles on the site was recently completely gone as it details the departure. Gives Wasn’t authorized to give. Ramin Khatibi, a site reliability engineer who left Twitter in 2019, tweeted that the system could run for so long with so little maintenance even without errors.
It was not clear Friday who was still employed and for how long. It did not block access to internal systems, although several people who did not sign the oath said Twitter locked them out of their corporate laptops on Friday, the first confirmation that it had effectively shut them down. Staff estimated that about 1,000 refused to sign the pledge on Thursday.
According to two employees familiar with the team, half the Trust and Security Policy team resigned, most of them working on misinformation, spam fake accounts and impersonation. Of those who chose to stay, many did so to maintain their health insurance or because without jobs they would be subject to deportation.
Musk meanwhile stepped up the moderation decisions, announcing on Twitter that the company had reinstated accounts including comedian Kathy Griffin, who mocked conservative humor site Babylon Bee, and right-wing self-help guru Jordan Peterson. Bee and Peterson were suspended for anti-transgender posts.
Musk previously said that banning and unbanning would wait until a moderation council was appointed and rules were drafted that would allow for frequent rulings. But there was no announcement that such a council of outside advisers had been appointed, drawing criticism from some civil rights leaders who met with Musk shortly after the site was taken over.