Status: 11/23/2022 5:53 p.m
With Elon Musk as the owner, thousands lost their jobs on Twitter. A former employee has it ARD Studio Los Angeles described how humiliating she experienced her dismissal.
Melissa Ingle found out about her resignation via a message on her cell phone. Suddenly she couldn’t log into the programs she needs for her job at Twitter. She knew then: It’s over. It was incredibly impersonal and demeaning, she says. The official termination comes two days later – by e-mail.
Nils Dampz
ARD Studio Los Angeles
Job market flooded with good people
“My full-time job is looking for a job,” says the former Twitter employee. It’s difficult because the market is flooded with extremely good people all looking for a job. Her biggest concerns: Can she continue to afford to live in the extremely expensive city of San Francisco? And whether she can offer her two children a Merry Christmas.
Melissa Ingle used to work at Twitter in the department that handles tweets with problematic content.
Image: Nils Dampz/ARD Studio Los Angeles
Melissa Ingle is a data scientist who spent over a year working on key content moderation at Twitter. It takes care of tweets with problematic content. “We wrote and oversaw the algorithms that automatically detected tweets containing political misinformation,” says Ingle.
“Complaints increased by 50 percent”
Since Musk took over, she says, misinformation has increased – and not just that. Compared to the pre-Musk period, the number of complaints about hate speech and offensive tweets has increased by half. The reason is the dismissal of many employees.
Melissa Ingle explains why this is so: On Twitter, there are an average of 37.5 million tweets per hour. Algorithms and artificial intelligence are absolutely necessary to check for hate speech, false information or child pornography, for example. Humans alone couldn’t do it.
Algorithms cannot do everything
But even algorithms cannot do everything. “They don’t do a perfect job. They don’t recognize what a parody or satire is. They can’t do that,” says Ingle. That’s why people are needed to maintain the algorithms, change them again and again and keep them up to date – if laws change, for example. Algorithms only know what you teach them. But there are hardly any people on Twitter who check the critical tweets, says the former employee.
In a WhatsApp group, she is still in contact with former and current Twitter employees. Elon Musk had announced content moderation advice. It should consist of members from different political directions, but doesn’t seem to exist, says Ingle: “People who have worked directly in this area and are still doing it have no evidence of it.”
Staff morale down?
Melissa Ingle was not employed but was employed through a temp agency. That is also the reason why they ARD Studio Los Angeles gives an interview. She didn’t sign an otherwise usual non-disclosure agreement – but she didn’t get any severance pay either. She wants the public to know what’s happening right now on Twitter.
“I’m very worried,” says Ingle. Employee morale is down. For example, Elon Musk had internal company chats searched. If someone criticized Musk, he or she was fired.
Melissa Ingle cannot say whether Twitter will survive under Elon Musk. “But the platform can’t function in a healthy way – not with the team he’s putting in place for content moderation right now.”
Ex Twitter employee: Termination is “degrading”
Nils Dampz, ARD Los Angeles, 11/23/2022 12:38 p.m