Meta braces for layoffs
PLUS: A twist in Twitter's trust and safety layoffs, and a new verification mess
On Wednesday, Meta is expected to carry out the largest set of layoffs ever. No one knows how many jobs the company might cut, but with the company hoping to trim expenses by 10 percent, the Wall Street Journal reported that “many thousands of employees” will likely be impacted.
Without knowing the size or shape of the cuts, it’s impossible to assess how the company might be affected. Every layoff can represent a tragedy to those on the receiving end, and Wednesday will surely be among the saddest in the company’s 18-year history.
At the same time, it’s worth noting just how big Meta has gotten lately. Here are Jeff Horwitz and Salvador Rodriguez in the Journal:
Meta, like other tech giants, went on a hiring spree during the pandemic as life and business shifted more online. It added more than 27,000 employees in 2020 and 2021 combined, and added a further 15,344 in the first nine months of this year—about one-fourth of that during the most recent quarter.
And so on one hand, were Meta to cut 8,000 jobs, it would undoubtedly have significant effects on the company, and likely in ways that will be difficult to wholly predict on Wednesday. On the other, that number of cuts would put Meta back at the number of jobs it had … sometime in June?
Meta declined to comment. But Insider, citing posts in the anonymous workplace chat app Fishbowl, reports on a handful of divisions expected to see deep cuts. Here are Kali Hays and Rob Price:
The Facebook app, still the company's largest user base and driver of revenue, is expected to be reorganized, and the business functions division, which includes marketing, partnerships and HR, "will be harder hit than others," according to the Fishbowl post. "In some cases even entire departments will be deprioritized," the post added. It also said company directors were informed Tuesday by executive leadership of specific plans for the layoffs.
That tracks with a post I saw on Blind, another anonymous workplace chat app. According to that post, which some employees have told me they find credible, affected workers will be informed of their status via email on Wednesday morning.
That same post had said, accurately, that directors would be informed about the cuts by this afternoon; the Journal reported that Mark Zuckerberg held a meeting with top executives Tuesday to apprise them of the changes. And it said severance would be generous; the Journal reported that employees’ will get four months’ worth of pay.
One angle worth keeping an eye on: how layoffs may affect various teams focused on platform integrity. The company insists that it still has its eye on the ball when it comes to monitoring for misinformation, foreign interference and the like. But the past year or so has seen regular headlines about reorganizations and dwindling resources for teams including Civic Integrity, CrowdTangle, and business integrity.
With the company’s stock down more than 70 percent this year, it may be tempting to make further reductions in those watchdog functions. If that happens, we want to hear about it: just reply to this email.
Twitter’s trust & safety layoffs, revisited
Speaking of dwindling watchdog functions: one question that has gotten much attention since Twitter’s layoffs last week is to what extent its trust and safety teams have been affected. Concerns about new owner Elon Musk and his often tasteless tweets have led to a significant pullback from advertisers, who worry that the company has lost the ability to ensure that their ads don’t appear next to violent or pornographic content.
In a Twitter thread on Friday, Yoel Roth, who runs trust and safety at the company, attempted to put the timeline at ease. While the company had lost around 50 percent of its staff overall, he wrote, the trust and safety team had lost only 15 percent of its team.
That may have been true in a technical sense, but employees I spoke with said it papers over a more troubling reality. The reason: while the overall reduction in employees may have been smaller, it still wiped out some crucial teams entirely. Among them: a team called Responsible Product Development, which reviewed new products in an effort to make them safer and less prone to abuse before they rolled out to consumers.
Michaela Smiley, who was director of product trust at Twitter until the layoffs, wrote about the team’s contribution in a LinkedIn post:
“I’m so proud of our group: the transformational changes we made to Twitter for the betterment and safety of people’s experiences all over the world; the products we launched, the policies we poured over, and the culture we built. I’m grateful for each individual in Product Trust and the hundreds of Tweeps we collaborated with adjacently that tirelessly showed up, made decisions with integrity, and leaned into imagining and building what could and should be — creating a world where responsible innovation was possible.
Her former boss, Matt Williams, who is still at the company, responded: “You and the team deserve far better.”
The situation at the new Twitter remains highly fluid, and it’s difficult to draw too many conclusions about what this means for how the company will prevent abuse in new products going forward. But one former employee told us that there is currently just one person from the trust and safety organization working with the product team on feature development — “an overwhelming task,” they said.
“I’m really worried for what kind of health risks these new products are going to entail,” the former employee said.
A verified mess
And speaking of product development at Twitter, let’s talk about verification. I wrote yesterday about the company’s struggles to create a more viable version of its Blue subscription product, which has been stymied by concerns that opening up verification to everyone will lead to more impersonation and other scams. This is particularly true in the event that government accounts, elected officials and other notable tweeters opt not to pay Twitter $8 a month for the privilege of a checkmark.
On Tuesday Esther Crawford, who has been running the Blue revamp in close consultation with Musk, presented the company’s latest solution. Verification will be open to all via Blue, but those high-profile and government accounts will now get an “Official” label and a grey check:
“Not all previously verified accounts will get the ‘Official’ label and the label is not available for purchase,” Crawford added. “Accounts that will receive it include government accounts, commercial companies, business partners, major media outlets, publishers and some public figures.”
Just one week ago, Musk tweeted — accurately — that Twitter’s existing verification system is not equitable. “Twitter’s current lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit,” he wrote. “Power to the people! Blue for $8/month.”
Seven days later, Musk, Crawford and co. have managed to replicate that lords-and-peasants system under another name. The status and privileges once reserved for “verified” blue checks will now be transferred to “official” grey checks, and won’t it be interesting to see whom the company blesses with the latter.
“We’ll continue to experiment with ways to differentiate between account types,” Crawford said. If I were Twitter, I’d run several more of these “experiments” before launch — and junk the nonsensical grey-check system the company announced today.
Otherwise, as Jeff Seibert, who used to run consumer product at Twitter, noted, “the blue check will now mean nothing except ‘I paid the richest man on earth $8.”
Governing
Two years of misinformation about the integrity of the 2020 election has set the stage for potentially violent conflicts following the US midterms. (Isaac Stanley-Becker and Drew Harwell / Washington Post)
Election workers have faced an onslaught of online threats and harassment since the 2020 election, and it’s expected to get worse after the midterms. (Cat Zakrzewski / Washington Post)
Election misinformation continues to spread through immigrant communities via messaging apps like WhatsApp and WeChat, where the lies are difficult to police. (Pranshu Verma / Washington Post)
EU regulators set a March 23 deadline for a deeper probe (into Microsoft’s proposed $69 billion takeover of Activision Blizzard. (Stephanie Bodoni / Bloomberg)
Greece is banning the sale of spyware after the government was accused of targeting prominent politicians and journalists for surveillance. (Niki Kitsantonis and Matina Stevis-Gridneff / New York Times)
Inside the complicated relationship between Meta and the Oversight Board, which has set its sights beyond the tech giant to try and impact the tech industry at large. (Steven Levy / Wired)
Industry
Changpeng “CZ” Zhao announced Binance has reached a deal to buy rival firm FTX, run by Sam Bankman-Fried, after FTX struggled to meet a surge of withdrawal requests set off by Binance selling its roughly $530 million holding of FTT coins. We don’t have a lot of details about this one, but it sure seems huge. (David Yaffe-Bellany / New York Times) and (Philip Lagerkranser and Joanna Ossinger / Bloomberg)
Job cuts in the tech industry are rapidly spiking as companies respond to a slowing economy and disappointing earnings. (Julia Love / Bloomberg)
Twitter fired a bunch of site reliability engineers as part of last week’s layoffs — and now bugs are starting to pop up, threatening bigger breaks to come. (Chris Stokel-Walker / MIT Technology Review)
Bloomberg and CNN said they won’t pay for reporters to be verified through Twitter Blue. Understandably, at this point. (Steven Perlberg / Insider)
TikTok is restructuring its US teams with a bigger focus on e-commerce as the social platform responds to a slowing economy. (Patrick McGee and Cristina Criddle / Financial Times)
Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group are negotiating with TikTok to share advertising revenue and increase the royalties it pays them for rights. (Olivia Solon, Lucas Shaw, and Giles Turner / Bloomberg)
Apple is now the most profitable tech company operating in China, thanks in large part to diplomacy efforts by Tim Cook. (Patrick McGee and Ryan McMorrow / Financial Times)
Evans Hankey, who replaced Jony Ive as Apple’s head of design, is departing the company after just three years in the role, leaving a gaping hole on a critical team. (Mark Gurman / Bloomberg)
Salesforce laid off hundreds of employees yesterday after the company saw demand for its services dip. (Jordan Novet / CNBC)
Signal rolled out its stories feature for iOS and Android users with a planned rollout for desktop soon. Why???? (Aisha Malik / TechCrunch)
Zoom is releasing new Mail and Calendar clients and services as part of its push to become a complete hybrid work solution for businesses. (Umar Shakir / The Verge)
Google and the Renault Group are developing an advanced software platform for future vehicles that’ll be built on Google’s Android Automotive operating system. (Andrew J. Hawkins / The Verge)
Those good tweets
Talk to us
Send us tips, comments, questions, and layoff news: casey@platformer.news and zoe@platformer.news.
Meta braces for layoffs
What a strange set of corporate decisions. Maybe Twitter is going to lean into allowing people to earn many badges. I mean why stop at 2 when people could have dozens...
I just always assumed he bought Twitter to shut it down.