X Corp. has slashed 30% of trust and safety staff, an Australian online safety watchdog says

abcnews.go.com:

Australia’s online safety watchdog says the owner of the social media platform formerly known as Twitter has slashed its global trust and safety staff by 30% including an 80% reduction in the number of safety engineers since billionaire Elon Musk took ...

MELBOURNE, Australia — X Corp., the owner of the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, has slashed its global trust and safety staff by 30% including an 80% reduction in the number of safety engineers since billionaire Elon Musk took over in 2022, Australia’s online safety watchdog said on Thursday.

Australia’s eSafety Commission, which describes itself as the world’s first government agency dedicated to keeping people safer online, released summaries of answers provided by X to questions about how its policies about hateful conduct were enforced.

The commission said in a statement while X had previously given estimates of the reduction in staffing, the answers were the first specific figures on where staff reductions had been made to become public.

Since the day before Musk bought control of San Francisco-based Twitter on Oct. 28, 2022, until a reporting period imposed by the commission closed May 31, 2023, trust and safety staff globally had been reduced from 4,062 to 2,849 employees and contractors. That reduction is 30% globally and 45% of those in the Asia-Pacific region.

Engineers focused on trust and safety issues at X had been reduced from 279 globally to 55, a fall of 80%. Full-time employee content moderators had been reduced 52% from 107 to 51. Content moderators employed on contract fell 12% from 2,613 to 2,305.

X had also revealed it had reinstated 6,100 previously banned accounts, including 194 who had been suspended for hateful conduct. The