On June 1, Ella Irwin, Twitter’s vice president of trust and safety, announced her resignation from the social media company while speaking to Reuters. Fortune earlier reported that Irwin’s internal Slack account appeared to be deactivated.
The very next day, on June 2, Twitter’s head of brand safety and ad quality, AJ Brown, resigned from the company. His Linkden reflects that he served in the company till June. He has been with the company since November last year. He worked as a senior executive to reassure advertisers that Twitter is a safe place for their ads.
Just in a few days, two safety leaders resigned from Twitter. Even before taking on the position of the next Twitter CEO, Linda Yaccarino will face difficulties due to the recent departures of top-level employees from the company. Her main priority is to focus on ad sales and grow subscription revenue. Amid the backlash and insecurity, Twitter is facing from companies and advertisers.
Irwin joined Twitter in June and assumed leadership of the trust and safety team in November when Yoel Roth, the previous head, resigned. Her responsibilities included managing content moderation.
As per the report, Irwin was considered to be one the staunchest supporters of Musk. Though she left Twitter during the initial days of Musk’s takeover, she was asked to join due to the surge of mass resignations happening in the company.
Irwin joined the trust and safety team and quickly climbed up the ranks within the company. Notably, in December 2022, she and Musk had a fallout regarding turning off the suicide prevention measures on Twitter. The #ThereIsHelp feature, which was intended to offer information for preventing suicide along with specific content, was deactivated by Twitter.
According to a report by Ars Technica, Irwin emailed Reuters shortly after they first reported the story to confirm that the feature had been “temporarily removed.” She stated that the feature would be reinstated by this week after Twitter finishes “fixing and revamping our prompts.”
Elon Musk, in contrast to Irwin, claimed that Reuters’ article on the matter was inaccurate and that the feature was never removed, which caused things to take an odd turn. Musk then reminded users that “Twitter doesn’t prevent suicide” in a subsequent tweet, calling the Reuters piece “fake news.”
Since being acquired by billionaire Elon Musk in October, Twitter has come under fire for its inadequate protection against harmful content. Irwin and Brown’s exit happened when the platform was struggling to retain sponsors as brands were leery of having their products show near-inappropriate content.
Brown made an effort to counter the perception that Twitter wasn’t brand-safe. In a blog post from January, he spoke about Twitter’s collaborations with ad tech firms DoubleVerify and IAS on how these agreements stop advertisements from running next to objectionable keywords. Even though some of those advertisers have returned, the company’s ad revenues are still weak.
Previously, Tiffany Hsu, a tech reporter covering misinformation and disinformation, wrote in The New York Times that advertisers are pulling back amidst sweeping layoffs at the company. Advertisers also fear that misinformation and hate speech would be allowed to proliferate on the platform under Elon Musk’s leadership. Last year many prominent companies, such as Volkswagen and Carlsberg stopped their advertising on Twitter.
After the takeover bid of Twitter, many employees from the company were laid off as a part of the restructuring. Many left because of the recent management change; most of them were working to safeguard elections, thwart dangerous and unlawful content, and promote factual information on the network.
Recently, on April 21, Chris Messina left Twitter and confirmed it through a tweet due to Musk’s mismanagement. He was the inventor of hashtags that were used to categorise messages.
Messina left the platform, citing Elon Musk’s mismanagement and was upset about the verification process of the blue ticks on Twitter accounts. Twitter began deleting the traditional blue ticks earlier this month, and those wishing to keep them will have to pay $8 monthly for a Twitter Blue subscription.
