Twitter’s Head of Trust and Safety Resigns After Just 7 Months
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Twitter’s head of trust and safety Ella Irwin resigned on Thursday, Reuters reported.
After Elon Musk decimated the social media company’s Trust and Safety Council — which was comprised of about 100 independent civil rights leaders and advocates from around the world — the Tesla owner installed Irwin as VP. Taking the helm, Irwin was tasked with mitigating harmful content such as hate speech, and keeping users safe from fraud and abuse with a gutted staff.
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In a Reuters interview shortly after, Irwin said Musk encouraged the company to rely more on automation and less on human review when making content moderation decisions. However, former staffers warned that Musk’s mass firing of security staff and increased reliance on automation would make it easier for tyrants to silence their critics.
Following a story published by Reuters on the disappearance of Twitter’s #ThereIsHelp suicide prevention feature, the VP gave the publication a statement confirming it had been deactivated. The feature was “temporarily removed” while Twitter was “fixing and revamping our prompts,” she stated. However, the next day Musk tweeted in response to Reuters: “False, it is still there,” and called the report “fake news” before writing, “Twitter doesn’t prevent suicide.”
In response, Irwin told The Daily Beast: “Elon did not actually contradict my specific comments, however he did comment on the overall narrative of a specific press story being false.”
Before joining the social media company, Irwin was vice president of product focusing on consumer trust at Twilio for more than two years; before that, she was a director at Amazon targeting marketplace abuse for four years.
Irwin joined Twitter in June 2022, but resigned after Musk’s takeover in October. After then-Twitter head of trust and safety Yoel Roth quit just after two weeks under Musk’s leadership, Musk brought Irwin back as his replacement. Her return followed massive layoffs and resignations at the company.
Sources also claimed that Irwin’s slack account has vanished from the company’s internal slack, according to Fortune.
Earlier this month, Musk announced that he had hired Linda Yaccarino, former NBCUniversal advertising chief, to become Twitter’s new CEO.
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