Head of safety for Twitter resigns

Twitter's head of safety says she has resigned from the company. (Photo: Gregory Bull/AP/File)

The director of trust and safety at Twitter has resigned.

Ella Irwin, who joined Twitter in June 2022, informed Reuters on Thursday that she had left the social media company, which had confronted criticism for lax protections against harmful content since October when billionaire Elon Musk acquired it.

Irwin assumed leadership of the trust and safety team in November when Yoel Roth resigned. She supervised the moderation of content.

Reuters reported that an email sent to Twitter received an automated response with a 'poo' emoticon. Irwin declined to comment further, and Musk did not respond promptly to a request for comment.

Irwin's departure comes when the platform has struggled to retain advertisers due to brands' reluctance to appear alongside inappropriate content.

Musk announced earlier this month that he had appointed Linda Yaccarino, the former head of advertising at NBCUniversal, Twitter's new CEO.

Fortune reported that Irwin's internal Slack account appeared to have been deactivated.

Since Musk's acquisition, Twitter has drastically reduced costs and laid off tens of thousands of employees, many of whom had worked to prevent harmful and illegal content, safeguard election integrity, and surface accurate information on the site.

Musk has promoted Community Notes, a feature that allows users to contribute context to tweets to combat misleading information on Twitter.

The company's moderation efforts are also confronting increasing scrutiny from regulators. Twitter withdrew from a voluntary agreement with the European Union to combat disinformation and pledged to comply with upcoming EU internet regulations.

The EU's chief of industry, Thierry Breton, warned Twitter last week that it could not circumvent legal obligations in the EU if it left the voluntary agreement.

Publish : 2023-06-02 10:55:00

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