It’s been almost two years since Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter – now X, after which the Tesla CEO laid off around 80% of staff.
These cuts included the ‘trust and safety’ team being slashed from 4,026 to 2,849, with full time moderators were halved from 107 to just 51.
Now, it seems X is back to hiring, as two dozen jobs have been listed on its careers site – for both cybersecurity and safety roles.
Band-aid on a bullet hole
The listings mention a number of locations for the new roles, with major US tech hubs such as New York City and Palo Alto, California included alongside X’s international offices at Manila in the Philippines and Delhi in India.
X announced in January 2024 it would be creating a new Trust and Safety center at its office in Austin, Texas, where a hundred full-time content moderators would be based, and these roles also appear to be included.
Of course, there’s still a very significant deficit from 2022’s staffing levels, but the move does point to a pretty significant symbolic defeat for Musk, who bought the platform in 2022 to ‘protect free speech’, but instead has undoubtedly ushered in an era of virtually unrestricted content.
This predictably landed X in hot water, with the platform recently shut down in Brazil after refusing to ban accounts spreading disinformation and hate messages – although Musk insisted this was political censorship. In a similar vein, almost half of all advertisers have left the site – and X lost nearly half a billion dollars in the first quarter of 2023.
Whilst the moderation staff will likely be a very welcome move, it’s difficult to imagine that just a few more staff will mitigate the ‘free for all’ philosophy introduced by Musk. On the security side, X is looking for threat intelligence specialists and security engineers to help secure the site.
In recent times, X has struggled with privacy and security concerns as well as bugs and crashes – worsened by the loss of staff. The quality assurance testing (or lack thereof) seems to have led to multiple issues, including external links breaking.
In an uncertain time for the platform, many users will be looking to Musk for some bold changes in order to make the site more secure – and this hiring spree could be a step in the right direction.
Via TechCrunch
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