Twitter began purging its enormous ranks of contract employees on Saturday after cutting the staff by half earlier in the month.
Why it matters: Like many businesses, Twitter employs both full-time employees and contract workers who are employed by a third party.
Twitter has laid off an undetermined number of contractors working in a variety of departments, including content moderation.
- Since Twitter lay off half of its personnel earlier this month, many contractors' position has been up in the air; others have no idea to whom to even report after learning that their internal counterparts have also been let go.
- Since their teams no longer have any full-time Twitter workers to approve their time cards, several employees are now concerned about receiving their final payments.
- Casey Newton of Platformer earlier on Saturday saw the contractor layoffs.
Between the lines: If not in all instances, at least some employees did not receive a direct message from Twitter informing them that their shift was over.
- Instead, they learned when their access to Twitter's computer systems was disabled.
- This is similar to the situation when full-time employees learned they had lost their jobs overnight on Thursday when they lost access to email and other company computing systems, not from a promised email on Friday.
- Since then, Twitter has contacted certain full-time workers to re-hire them after recognizing that their expertise was essential to ongoing initiatives, including new features that were important to the company.
- Meanwhile, other contractors are worried about receiving payment for the previous two weeks because some of them ended up working on teams without any full-time Twitter workers, leaving no one to approve their time cards.
The big picture: Since Elon Musk took over, Twitter has been in a state of upheaval, with new features and products being introduced and then quickly removed.
- Included in this is a new iteration of its Twitter Blue membership service, which enables users to receive the same blue checkmark granted to verified accounts of public figures, journalists, governmental organizations, and celebrities.
- After a wave of impersonators exploited the paid service to pose as popular athletes, politicians, and corporations, Twitter put that on pause earlier this week.
What they say is this: One of those eliminated was Melissa Ingle, a content moderation contractor with a San Francisco headquarters who specializes in political disinformation.
- Ingle, a data science instructor with two master's degrees, expressed astonishment at the relocation and worry about how she would support her family as the holidays drew near.
- "This is no way to treat people," I told you, "I'm the one you want working for your firm."
- An email sent to the company's press account received no quick response since Twitter has eliminated its entire communications team.