Twitter: How Elon Musk justified firing employees
Twitter's new owner, Elon Musk, said he "had no choice" but to reduce the company's workforce, as the company is losing more than $4 million a day.
Half of the company's staff are being laid off, a week after Musk bought Twitter in a $44 billion deal.
Twitter employees have been using the platform to talk about his resignation.
There are concerns that the company may ease content moderation, but Musk said the company's policies remain "absolutely unchanged.
As reports emerged on Friday that thousands of Twitter employees around the world were losing their jobs, questions were asked about the future of the employees responsible for removing harmful content from the social network. .
Online safety groups and activists have suggested that Musk may relax moderation policies, making Twitter less effective at removing hate speech and misinformation from the platform.
Twitter's permanent bans on controversial figures - including former US President Donald Trump - could also be removed. The changes come just before the US midterm elections, when misinformation is expected to rise.
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Those concerns were fueled by Musk's comments on Friday that sought to attribute Twitter's "massive drop in revenue" to "activist groups" that were "trying to destroy free speech in the United States."
"Twitter has seen a huge drop in revenue due to activist groups putting pressure on advertisers, although nothing has changed with content moderation and we have done everything we can to appease activists," he wrote.
Yoel Roth, Twitter's head of security and integrity, said most of the more than 2,000 content moderators working on the "frontline of review" were unaffected.
He said the "force reduction" affected about 15% of those working in the trust and safety area of Twitter - compared to what he said was a 50% cut seen across the company, which has about 7,500 employees.
An internal email sent to staff on Friday said the mass job cuts were "unfortunately necessary to ensure the company's future success".
Employees confirmed on Twitter that they were disconnected from work laptops and Slack, a messaging system.
Many employees revealed they were pulled from posts on the enterprise platform, painting a picture of cuts that spanned the world and hit departments ranging from marketing to engineering. They included communications, content curation, and product development staff.
Elon Musk, new owner, attributed layoffs to a 'massive drop in revenue'
Big brands have halted ad spend on Twitter, including Volkswagen, General Motors and Pfizer.
Almost all of Twitter's revenue these days comes from advertising, and Musk is looking at ways to cut costs and make money in different ways with the platform, including plans to charge a monthly subscription fee for users to be verified on the platform.
He also proposed that those paying the $8-a-month fee would have their tweets boosted in replies, mentions and polls, prompting criticism from some on Twitter that he was creating a system that would benefit those willing to pay.
Twitter employees have filed a class-action suit in the US, arguing that the company was making massive job cuts without 60 days' notice, in violation of federal and California law.
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