Free Republic

... While there are, of course, some anomalies, the layoff strategies that Big Tech has taken to date seem to careen between two extremes: cringe-worthy or Disney-villian-level. Many have resisted even using the term layoffs to avoid sending a signal to investors that their business is in trouble — a reality that anyone would be able to see simply by taking a quick glance at the stock market. But the industry has always been ruthless when it comes to firing. While it’s easy to forget given the growth of the tech sector over the past two decades, the dot-com boom...

Elon Musk has now purged roughly half of Twitter’s 7,500 employee base, leaving whole teams totally or near completely gutted, including those tasked with defending against election misinformation ahead of the US midterms next week, The Verge has learned. The areas of Twitter impacted the most by Musk’s cuts include its product trust and safety, policy, communications, tweet curation, ethical AI, data science, research, machine learning, social good, accessibility, and even certain core engineering teams, according to tweets by laid-off employees and people familiar with the matter. More company leaders, including Arnaud Weber, VP of consumer product engineering, and Tony...

Twitter began its highly anticipated mass layoffs Thursday evening by eliminating its top internal critics. Twitter’s Ethical AI team, according to former staff, is no more. Multiple members of Twitter’s Machine Learning, Ethics, Transparency and Accountability (META) team, including its former leader, posted on Twitter saying they were no longer at the company. At least one of the former workers suggested the entire team was being disbanded. The apparent layoffs impacting the company’s strongest internal watchdog group comes as thousands more brace for cuts potentially impacting around half of the company’s staff according to previous reports. Gizmodo found tweets from...