Just under two years after the mass layoffs at X’s trust, safety, and security teams, Elon Musk’s social media company is actively looking to recruit more employees to moderate content and secure its platform, according to X’s official job listings. X has posted two dozen new job openings in the past month, waiting evenly across its safety and cybersecurity teams. The listings say X’s safety team is looking for candidates for roles ranging from director of strategic response on X’s safety team to government affairs managers. On its cybersecurity teams, X has posted several positions for security engineers and threat intelligence specializations. These are relatively small numbers compared to the staff reductions Musk conducted after spending $44 billion to buy the former Twitter in late 2022. In April 2023, Musk told the BBC that the company, which he did not yet own but was masquerading as part of a “pre-buy organizing effort,” had cut its full-time headcount by 6,000 workers in six months. The remaining headcount, once the layoffs concluded, was 1,500 workers. Those cuts included drastic slashes to the company’s trust and safety team. In January of this year, after Australia’s online safety commissioner inquired about the layoffs, X said it had cut 80 percent of its trust and safety staff since Musk took over. X replied to Australia’s online safety commissioner that Twitter had 279 engineers on trust and safety teams worldwide before Musk bought the company, and that number was cut to 55 by the end of May 2023.
As a result, X said it cut its trust and safety team by nearly one-third to 2,849 employees (down from 4), full-time content moderation staff almost in half —59 down to 51—and contracted moderators before by only about ten percent—from some,613 people at the beginning of April.
More proof that X is looking to bulk up its safety staff can be found in several recent job listings: The company disclosed plans earlier this year for a new Trust and Safety hub in Austin, Texas with 100 full-time content moderators, jobs in america.
While nine of the two dozen jobs Facebook has posted in the last month mention Austin as a potential place to work, that means they still list their cities as New York City and Palo Alto (plus international offices like Manila, Phil.) — even though many have said they won’t go there.
When TechCrunch asked X’s press team a number of questions about these new hires from the netsec community, including how many people make up its safety and cyber-safety teams.
instead what they would get is an automated message telling them “too busy now, please come back later”
Not only did staff leave in X’s trust and safety team, but senior leadership as well. Particularly of note, the company’s chief cybersecurity officer Lea Kissner and trust & safety lead Ella Irwin have both departed since Musk came aboard.
Jobs in America .It seems that X has been struggling to protect itself and its users from multiple security vulnerabilities as well as moderate the hate speech, misinformation and other problematic content all over the world due to downsizing of trust & safety team at Cyber Security on top. The Supreme Court in Brazil on Friday all but outlawed X nationwide after Musk refused to take down accounts that were spreading misinformation. Musk himself has been ardently accused of spreading hateful content and misinformation in his capacity as Twitter’s owner. Tuesday, Musk shared a link to a podcast episode with him & andaustin. Musk posted to X a bunch of images this week from an AI generator basically portraying Vice President Kamala Harris as wearing a Communist hammer-and-sickle beret.
Musk had hosted an X Spaces event with ex-President Donald Trump that perished and was simply pushed back on the cybersecurity side. He accused the crash — without showing proof-of “a large-scale ddos attack on X.