Elon Musk Axes Twitter’s “Content Curation Team”

Twitter‘s “Curation” team, the group responsible for highlighting event on Twitter, has been fired, employees say.

“Here’s to the past and present Curation Tweeps I’ve had the absolute pleasure of working with for the past 18 months,” said Laura Savvas of Twitter.

According to Twitter’s description, the curation team is “responsible for highlighting and contextualizing the best events and stories that unfold on Twitter.”

“Our work, across multiple product surfaces, including Topics, Trends descriptions, and Moments, makes it easy for customers to experience only-on-Twitter conversations and get the most out of the platform, regardless of which accounts they follow,” the description continues.

“We manually monitor Trends and work to add context to help answer the question, ‘Why is this trending?’ We do this by attaching a representative Tweet to the Trend, adding a title and description, or curating a Moment to give more direct context. We may also add a combination of these.”

The team was also responsible for “topics” that they say helped users find “relevant” info

The curation team’s firing comes amid mass layoffs at the company, under the direction of new owner Elon Musk. “Twitter employees were notified in the email that the layoffs were set to begin.”

“Workers were instructed to go home and not return to the offices on Friday as the cuts proceeded. The message, which came from a generic address and was signed ‘Twitter,’ did not detail the total number of layoffs,” according to The New York Times.

Earlier this week, Musk dissolved Twitter’s Board of Directors and became the “sole director” of the company.

Musk has also made it clear that he would be ending Twitter’s work-from-home policies.

“Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists,” said Elon Musk on Twitter. “Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America.”

“In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday,” said an email. “We recognize that this will impact a number of individuals who have made valuable contributions to Twitter, but this action is, unfortunately, necessary to ensure the company’s success moving forward.”