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(单词翻译:双击或拖选)
Twitter employees quit in droves after Elon Musk1's ultimatum2 passes
Twitter saw a fresh exodus4 of employees on Thursday as the company hit a deadline set by billionaire owner Elon Musk for remaining staff to commit to being "extremely hardcore" or leave the company.
Departing employees posted on Twitter under the hashtag #LoveWhereYouWorked, announcing it was their last day at the social network. Twitter has been convulsed with chaos5 since Musk finalized6 his $44 billion purchase in late October. Many accompanied their posts with a saluting7 emoji, which has become a symbol inside Twitter of respect for those who are leaving.
Musk already laid off half the company's 7,500 full-time8 employees on November 4, reportedly cut thousands of contractors10 last weekend, and fired several employees who had criticized him publicly.
On Wednesday, in an email to staff entitled "A Fork in the Road," Musk said Twitter would "need to be extremely hardcore" to succeed. Those who chose to stay should expect long, intense hours of work. Those who left would receive three months' severance11 pay, he wrote. Employees were required to choose by Thursday afternoon.
The new wave of departures is adding to fears that Twitter is losing critical expertise12 in everything from how the site and its servers are run to how it keeps user data safe and complies with regulations to how it handles toxic13 and illegal content.
Earlier on Thursday, a group of Democratic senators sent an open letter to the Federal Trade Commission urging an investigation14 of Twitter. They said they were concerned the company may be violating the terms of a settlement with the agency stemming from past privacy violations15.
Musk "has taken alarming steps that have undermined the integrity and safety of the platform," the senators wrote.
Former worker warns cuts will have consequences
When Musk laid off half of Twitter's employees just days before the midterm elections, Melissa Ingle was left in limbo16.
She was a data scientist on Twitter's civic17 integrity team, monitoring the platform for tweets that might break its rules against misleading election claims. But she was a contractor9, not a Twitter employee. When the cuts happened, she didn't even know who was left to sign her time sheet.
"My boss was laid off, and my boss's boss — the head of the department — quit. So I did not know who my boss was. I didn't know what new assignment I had," she said.
With the end of voting quickly approaching, Ingle and her team worked overtime18 to flag falsehoods and violating tweets. She says she thinks they did a good job, given the circumstances.
"But at the same time, we're not really sure if the work we're doing matters to the new ownership."
On Saturday, she got an answer: she no longer had a job at Twitter.
"I only found out that I was fired [because] I happened to be looking at my phone at about 5:30 [P.M.], and I got a little pop up that said you've been logged out of one or more systems," Ingle recalled.
Rapid changes disrupt Twitter's business
Ingle and others warn, Musk's rapid changes risk compromising Twitter's ability to deal with toxic content and are already disrupting its business, as chaos spilling over onto the platform threatens its advertising19 revenue.
"There is a short-sighted view of platforms that can look at trust and safety work and integrity work as a bit of a cost center, and as the people that are trying to drag the company down rather than actually trying to help the company grow for the long term," said Jeff Allen, a former data scientist at Facebook who co-founded the Integrity Institute, a group focused on online trust and safety.
At Twitter, like other mainstream20 social media companies, this work relies heavily on people.
There are the staffers who set policies, workers like Ingle who develop automated21 systems to analyze22 the 37.5 million tweets posted every hour, and most crucially, a large group of content moderators who constantly review posts. They are almost entirely23 contractors.
Many of these workers have now been laid off or resigned. The first round of cuts slashed24 15% of Twitter's trust and safety employees, according to Yoel Roth, who led the division. Two days after the election, Roth quit.
The initial round of layoffs25 also eliminated Twitter's entire curation team of about 150 people. They played an important role adding context and descriptions to news and events trending on the platform, and curating collections of tweets from authoritative26 sources to help address misleading or false claims.
It's unclear how many of the contractors eliminated last weekend were content moderators. Twitter didn't respond to questions about details of the job cuts.
But losing even a portion of that workforce27 would be a blow. Ingle said their work is critical to improving the algorithms she wrote, and to understanding things computers can't, like sarcasm28 and parody29.
Automated systems "need constant input30 and updating and testing and tweaking, just like any other computer script would need...If there's not enough people to update the algorithms, they become more and more porous," she said. "Automation is a lofty goal, and it's a great goal. But we're just not there yet."
Global implications
Cutting back on content moderation could also land Musk in hot water with European regulators. German law, for example, requires social networks to quickly remove illegal content or face fines.
"Either you have content moderation, or you don't have it," said Sarah Roberts, an information studies professor at UCLA who briefly31 worked at Twitter earlier this year. "You don't just kind of have content moderation. Removing child sexual exploitation material is content moderation."
Ingle is also worried about the worldwide implications as big events loom32, from the World Cup, which starts on Saturday, to elections around the globe.
"We get hyper fixated in the U.S. on the U.S. elections, but we dealt with the recent Brazilian elections and we dealt with elections all over the world: Japan, India, the E.U., U.K.," she said. "If this global decline in Twitter happens, it's definitely going to affect democracies around the world."
Musk himself tweeted a conspiracy33 theory. Hate speech surged in the days after the deal closed. Accounts that repeatedly share false claims are getting more engagement, according to NewsGuard, which rates the reliability34 of online news sources.
Its analysis found while those accounts tweeted just 6% more in the week after Musk took control, they experienced a 57% increase in likes and retweets over the same period.
"The kinds of content they were spreading had disproportionately more misinformation than they usually had, and that is what leads to engagement," said NewsGuard co-CEO Gordon Crovitz.
Musk's first big product change — letting users buy so-called blue checks, which previously35 indicated that high-profile users were who they claimed to be — unleashed36 a flood of accounts impersonating companies, celebrities37 and politicians.
White nationalists and far-right extremists also signed up for the checks, according to a review of accounts by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Twitter's trust and safety team had warned about the potential for the feature to be abused ahead of its rollout in an internal document first reported by Platformer and seen by NPR.
That included "impersonation of world leaders, advertisers, brand partners, election officials and other high profile individuals." The document warned that "motivated scammers/bad actors" would likely be willing to pay for the increased visibility offered by the blue checks.
The team recommended ways to mitigate38 risk, most of which were not adopted, according to notes on the document.
The blue check debacle exacerbated39 Twitter's business woes40, as more advertisers halted spending. Roberts says it's no wonder big brands are wary41 — and not just of their messages appearing next to toxic tweets.
"They are concerned about being associated with Twitter itself as a brand," she said.
Amid the chaos, Twitter paused the paid blue check rollout. Musk said it will relaunch after Thanksgiving, with some guardrails.
收听单词发音 |
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musk
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| n.麝香, 能发出麝香的各种各样的植物，香猫 | |
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ultimatum
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| n.最后通牒 | |
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transcript
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| n.抄本，誊本，副本，肄业证书 | |
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exodus
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| v.大批离去，成群外出 | |
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chaos
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| n.混乱，无秩序 | |
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finalized
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| vt.完成（finalize的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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saluting
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| v.欢迎，致敬( salute的现在分词 )；赞扬，赞颂 | |
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full-time
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| adj.满工作日的或工作周的，全时间的 | |
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contractor
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| n.订约人，承包人，收缩肌 | |
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contractors
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| n.（建筑、监造中的）承包人( contractor的名词复数 ) | |
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severance
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| n.离职金；切断 | |
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expertise
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| n.专门知识(或技能等)，专长 | |
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toxic
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| adj.有毒的，因中毒引起的 | |
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investigation
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| n.调查，调查研究 | |
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violations
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| 违反( violation的名词复数 )； 冒犯； 违反（行为、事例）； 强奸 | |
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limbo
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| n.地狱的边缘；监狱 | |
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civic
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| adj.城市的，都市的，市民的，公民的 | |
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overtime
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| adj.超时的，加班的；adv.加班地 | |
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advertising
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| n.广告业；广告活动 a.广告的；广告业务的 | |
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mainstream
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| n.（思想或行为的）主流；adj.主流的 | |
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automated
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| a.自动化的 | |
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analyze
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| vt.分析，解析 (=analyse) | |
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entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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slashed
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| v.挥砍( slash的过去式和过去分词 )；鞭打；割破；削减 | |
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layoffs
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| 临时解雇( layoff的名词复数 )； 停工，停止活动 | |
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authoritative
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| adj.有权威的，可相信的；命令式的；官方的 | |
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workforce
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| n.劳动大军，劳动力 | |
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sarcasm
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| n.讥讽，讽刺，嘲弄，反话 （adj.sarcastic） | |
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parody
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| n.打油诗文，诙谐的改编诗文，拙劣的模仿；v.拙劣模仿，作模仿诗文 | |
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input
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| n.输入(物)；投入；vt.把(数据等)输入计算机 | |
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briefly
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| adv.简单地，简短地 | |
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loom
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| n.织布机，织机；v.隐现，(危险、忧虑等)迫近 | |
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conspiracy
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| n.阴谋，密谋，共谋 | |
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reliability
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| n.可靠性，确实性 | |
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previously
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| adv.以前，先前（地） | |
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unleashed
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| v.把（感情、力量等）释放出来，发泄( unleash的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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celebrities
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| n.（尤指娱乐界的）名人( celebrity的名词复数 )；名流；名声；名誉 | |
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mitigate
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| vt.（使）减轻，（使）缓和 | |
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exacerbated
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| v.使恶化，使加重( exacerbate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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woes
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| 困境( woe的名词复数 )； 悲伤； 我好苦哇； 某人就要倒霉 | |
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wary
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| adj.谨慎的，机警的，小心的 | |
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