Twitter’s head of trust and safety resigns in latest high-profile departure
Twitter’s head of trust and safety, Ella Irwin, has resigned from the company, marking the latest high-profile departure from the struggling social network since Elon Musk acquired it in October.
Irwin confirmed her departure to news outlets on Thursday but declined to comment further. Fortune earlier reported that Irwin’s internal Slack account appeared to have been deactivated.
Irwin, who oversaw content moderation, is the second head of trust and safety to step down since Musk took over, replacing the previous head Yoel Roth in November after his resignation.
Twitter has faced criticism for lax protections against harmful content since the billionaire businessman acquired the company in October for $44bn. Irwin’s departure comes as the platform also struggles with technical challenges – including last week’s bungled rollout of Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign on Twitter Spaces – alongside mass layoffs and an exodus of advertisers wary of appearing next to unsuitable content.
An investor in the company recently revealed its value had dropped by two-thirds since Musk’s takeover.
Musk announced earlier this month that he hired Linda Yaccarino, the former NBCUniversal advertising chief, to become Twitter’s new CEO.
Since Musk’s acquisition, Twitter has cut costs dramatically and laid off thousands of employees, including many who had worked on efforts to prevent harmful and illegal content, protect election integrity and surface accurate information on the site.
Musk has promoted a feature called Community Notes, which lets users add context to tweets, as a way to combat misleading information on Twitter.
The company is also facing increasing scrutiny from regulators over its moderation efforts. Twitter withdrew from a voluntary agreement with the European Union to tackle disinformation, while saying it was committed to complying with upcoming internet rules in the EU.
The EU industry chief Thierry Breton warned Twitter last week that it would not be able to avoid legal obligations in the EU after quitting the voluntary agreement.
Yoel Roth, writing in a New York Times op-ed on his resignation shortly after Musk took over the company, said he had chosen to leave because it was clear Musk would be unilaterally calling the shots. “A Twitter whose policies are defined by unilateral edict has little need for a trust and safety function dedicated to its principled development,” Roth wrote.
Reuters contributed reporting
Source: The Guardian US
