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The Sydney Morning Herald has reported that social media company Twitter has now totally wiped out its workforce in Australia after firing its remaining staff in the country.
This leaves Twitter without local personnel to communicate with the government or handle problems that develop in Australia.
CEO Elon Musk has fired hundreds of employees and disconnected servers for the purpose of minimising costs.
Prior to Musk’s purchase of Twitter last year, the company was in the red, but it now also has to deal with interest from the loans Musk used to pay for the $US44 billion (AUD63 billion) acquisition.
In a round of global layoffs in November, Musk had laid off more than half of Twitter’s then 40 or so Australian employees.
The workforce that remained worked mostly in advertising sales; communications, news curation, and government relations staff were eliminated, and several employees left on their own volition.
Read also: Twitter breach exposes 200 million email addresses (commsroom.co)
A number of other offices in the area are also closing, in addition to Twitter’s local office, according to anonymous accounts from individuals who were not authorised to speak to the press.
After Twitter stopped renting out its Sydney CBD headquarters, employees in Australia were already working from home.
Australia’s e-Safety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant criticised the action following the most recent round of cuts.
According to Grant, removing workers with specialised knowledge in trust and safety tasks and in-depth understanding of how the platform’s policies and tools operate could jeopardise the business’s capacity to resist misuse, false information and harms in the future.
Meanwhile, other social media giants such as Meta, Facebook and Instagram’s parent company; Google, YouTube’s owner; Snap, which owns Snapchat; and TikTok all have existing staff in Australia.
You may also want to read: ACMA urged to continuously push compliance to misinformation code (commsroom.co)
Jaw de Guzman is the content producer for Comms Room, a knowledge platform and website aimed at assisting the communications industry and its professionals.
