Nearly two years after laying off X's entire trust, safety, and security team, Elon Musk's social media company is now looking to hire new employees to help moderate content and ensure the security of the platform, according to an official X job listing.
Last month, Company X posted 24 jobs, evenly distributed between its safety and cybersecurity teams.
Job roles within the safety team at X range from Director of Strategic Response to Government Relations Manager for the safety team at X. In its cybersecurity team, X employs several security engineers and threat intelligence experts.
These are small numbers compared to the number of employees Musk laid off after buying the old Twitter Inc. for $44 billion in late 2022. In April 2023, Musk told the BBC that the company, then known as Twitter Inc., had cut its workforce by 6,000 over a six-month period, leaving it with around 1,500 employees when the layoffs were complete.
These cuts also included significant reductions to the company's trust and safety team. In January of this year, following an investigation by the Australian Online Safety Commissioner, X announced that it had laid off 80% of its trust and safety staff since Musk's acquisition. In its response, X also said that before Musk's acquisition, it had 279 engineers in its trust and safety team around the world, but that this had been reduced to 55 by the end of May 2023.
Overall, Company X reduced its trust and safety team of 4,062 people by almost a third to 2,849, its full-time content moderation team from 107 to 51, and its contract moderators from 2,613 to 2,305, according to a report from the Australian eSafety Commissioner at the time.
A screenshot from the Australian eSafety Commissioner's report on X, which also includes statistics on X's reliability and safety, as well as cuts to its content moderation team. Image credit: TechCrunch / Screenshot.
The recent job postings appear to confirm that X is further strengthening its safety team, following its January announcement that it would open a new Trust and Safety Center in Austin, Texas, staffing it with 100 full-time content moderators.
Nine of the 24 jobs posted last month listed Austin as a possible location, but also listed other cities such as New York City and Palo Alto, California, as well as international offices such as Manila, Philippines, and Delhi, India.
When TechCrunch reached out to X's PR team with a series of questions about these new hires, including the size of the company's safety and cybersecurity team, the company responded with an automated message saying, “We're busy right now, check back later.”
The departures from X's trust, safety and cybersecurity teams include not just staff, but also senior management: Leah Kisner, the company's chief cybersecurity officer, and Ella Irwin, the company's head of trust and safety, have both left the company since Musk took over.
Cuts to its reliability, safety and cybersecurity teams have left X less able to protect itself and its users, and it appears less able to address complex content moderation issues around the world.
On Friday, Brazil's Supreme Court effectively banned X across the country after Musk refused to remove accounts spreading misinformation. Since taking over as Twitter's owner, Musk himself has been accused of spreading hateful content and disinformation. On Tuesday, Musk promoted a podcast episode featuring a guest who has been accused of engaging in Holocaust denial. Also this week, Musk posted several images on X from an AI generator of a person resembling Vice President Kamala Harris wearing a beret holding a communist hammer and sickle.
On the cybersecurity front, Musk hosted an X-Space event with former President Donald Trump, which was crashed and delayed. Musk attributed the cause of the crash to “a massive hack,” without providing evidence. [distributed denial-of-service] “Attack on X”