On Thursday, Elon Musk, the new head of Twitter, announced that the company is laying off staff from its global offices. This follows other recent layoffs, with the entire Ethical AI team being fired by SpaceX CEO Musk agreed to eliminate back in August. Rumman Chowdhury, director of ML Ethics, Transparency and Accountability at Twitter, tweeted earlier today that she had been terminated without warning. Soon after this tweet was posted, farewell messages were shared from other employees confirming they too were terminated as part of the global layoffs.
Recently, Rumman Chowdhury discussed the relief of not having been one of the unlucky ones in recent layoffs. He recently wrote, “feeling that you’ve made it and got out before Thanos snaps his fingers.”
She posted a screenshot of her logged out account details. She mentioned that her credentials have been changed.
According to Wired, Chowdhury said that after Musk took over his team’s work is on hold until stocks of the company go up. “We were told, without question, not to rock the boat,” she said.
According to a report by Wired, Chowdhury was quoted earlier this week as saying that his team’s work was on hold after Musk took over. “We were told, without question, not to rock the boat,” she said.
Another employee of the Ethical AI team, former Twitter META senior engineering manager Joan Deitchman, posted a tweet thanking the members of her group for being “full of integrity.”
In a follow-up tweet, Deitchman confirmed that the entire team had been fired. She also detailed the team’s current development and their work to promote “algorithmic transparency and algorithmic choice.”
This is not the only team that have been fired by the new Twitter CEO under the recent management changes. In India, Twitter has fired the majority of its over 200 employees as part of mass layoffs across the globe layoffs.
Sources said the layoffs are across engineering, sales and marketing, and communications teams. It has also being said that the entire marketing and communications department in India has been sacked.