Twitter Singapore content moderation team reportedly hit with cuts

The avalanche of tech job cuts that have been sweeping the globe in the last few months have reached Twitter Singapore’s shores with deeper cuts being made – especially on the company’s trust and safety team handling global content moderation.

According to people familiar with the matter in an article by The Straits Times and Bloomberg, cuts were also made to the company’s Dublin office. Twitter reportedly eliminated roles in areas of the company that did not get enough volume to justify continued support. 

The move comes shortly findings were from the Center for Countering Digital Hate and Anti-Defamation League said in reports that hate speech has radically gone up on the Twitter platform since the takeover by Elon Musk. According to CNN, the study found that the daily use of the n-word under Musk is triple the 2022 average and the use of slurs against gay men and trans persons are up 58% and 62%, respectively.

It isn’t clear if the cut in resources in Dublin and Singapore will be used to grow content moderation teams in other parts of the world.

This isn’t the first major layoff to impact Twitter employees in Singapore. Last November,  several members across engineering, sales and marketing teams also exit the company.

The layoffs come shortly after Twitter’s new chief executive officer, Elon Musk, announced plans to eliminate about half the company’s global workforce in an attempt to bring costs down. This came very soon after Musk acquired the social media company for US$44 billion last year in October. Musk has since overseen the departure of about 5,000 of Twitter's 7,500 global workforce.

The news comes as little surprise though as Twitter employees have been bracing themselves for the layoffs for months now, particularly as Musk began stating that he wanted to focus on the core product rather than staff “Software engineering, server operations [and] design will rule the roost,” he tweeted in early October.

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