Twitter loses second trust and safety chief since Elon Musk takeover

Twitter’s head of trust and safety has resigned from the social media company, according to a report.

Ella Irwin told Reuters news agency she had resigned, not long after Fortune reported her internal Slack account appeared to have been deactivated.

Ms Irwin oversaw content moderation – a controversial subject for a company that has been criticised for lax protection against harmful content since billionaire Elon Musk took over in October.

Soon after Musk took over, he sacked half of the company’s 8,000 workers, including around 15% of the trust and safety department.

The department’s then-head Yoel Roth resigned in November and was replaced by Ms Irwin.

Under Musk’s leadership, there have been mixed efforts at moderating inappropriate and inaccurate content.

He has been promoting a new feature called Community Notes, which lets users provide additional context to tweets in a bid to tackle disinformation.

But he also changed the platform’s verification system so that its blue ticks are now subscription-only, instead of a marker of authenticity or notability.

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In December, he oversaw the dissolution of Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council – an advisory group of nearly 100 independent civil, human rights and other organisations formed in 2016 to address hate speech, child exploitation, suicide, self-harm and other problems on the platform.

Throughout the months of Musk’s stewardship, some of Twitter’s advertisers have pulled away, wary of being seen next to unsuitable content.

Mr Musk announced in May he had hired former NBCUniversal advertising chief Linda Yaccarino to be the company’s new chief executive.

He will be hoping the 60-year-old’s background in advertising will come in handy as they try to lure advertisers back to the platform.

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