Elon Musk fires thousands of Twitter contractors tasked with tackling misinformation on the site a week after laying off half of his permanent staff

New Twitter owner Elon Musk fired thousands of Twitter contractors for fighting misinformation on the site a week after firing half of his permanent staff

According to Mail Online, the social media giant on Saturday fired its contractors who track hate and other harmful content. Some of the contractors said they didn’t realize they had been laid off until they couldn’t log in to work on Saturday November 12.

The move comes after Twitter laid off much of its full-time email workforce on Nov. 4. About 4,400 of 5,500 contractors have been laid off, according to Platformer News reporter Casey Newton.

Melissa Ingle, who worked at Twitter as a contractor for more than a year, was one of several contractors who said they were furloughed without notice on Saturday. She said she feared there would be an increase in abuse on Twitter with the number of workers leaving.

“I love the platform and I’ve really enjoyed working in the company and trying to make it better. And I’m really scared of what’s going to slip through the cracks,” she said.

Newton said the affected employees are involved in Twitter’s marketing, content moderation and real estate sectors.

“Entrepreneurs aren’t savvy at all, they just lose access to Slack and email,” Newton wrote on Twitter. “Managers realized this when their employees simply disappeared from the system. They heard nothing from their leaders.

A Twitter manager wrote on the company’s Slack site that a contractor was working on a child safety workflow when it was locked out without warning, according to Newton.

A contractor said he learned he was fired from Newton’s tweets reporting the mass shooting.

“Just found out I got fired reading your tweets then trying to log in on Slack and email and realized it was all gone,” the entrepreneur wrote.

Ingle, a data scientist, said she works on the data and monitoring arm of Twitter’s civic integrity team. His job was to write algorithms to find political disinformation on the platform in countries like the United States, Brazil, Japan, Argentina and elsewhere.

Ingle said she was “pretty sure I was screwed” when she couldn’t access her work email on Saturday. Notification from the contracting company she had been hired by came two hours later.

“I’m just going to post my resume and talk to people,” she said. ‘I have two children. And I worry about being able to give them a good Christmas, you know, and just mundane things like that, which are important. I just think it’s especially cruel to do that right now.