A handful of top privacy, security, and safety executives at Twitter have quit in the last day, walking out amid the increasing chaos caused by the erratic behavior of new owner Elon Musk, according to multiple reports.
The departures of chief information security officer Lea Kissner, chief privacy officer Damien Kieran, and chief compliance officer Marianne Fogarty were first reported by Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer, journalists for the tech blog Platformer, on Thursday morning.
Hours later, Platformer reported the exit of Yoel Roth, the company’s moderation and safety leader, who had led the push to reassure rattled users that Twitter would not spiral into anarchy in Musk’s hands.
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Some right-wing commentators had implored Musk to fire Roth as soon as the billionaire took over due to old tweets Roth had penned in which he called former President Donald Trump a “racist tangerine.” But Musk said he supported Roth, praising his “high integrity” and urging Twitter users to follow him for “the most accurate understanding of what’s happening with trust & safety at Twitter.” Roth, in turn, had been publicly supportive of Musk in the days after the shock takeover.
Head of client solutions Robin Wheeler, who led a headline-generating Twitter Spaces on Wednesday, was also out, according to Newton, who cited multiple unnamed sources. Wheeler had been tapped to smooth advertisers’ ruffled feathers on the hour-long livestream, pushing him to address content moderation and account verification practices.
Kissner confirmed her resignation in a Thursday morning tweet, while Kieran tweeted out a message that appeared to indirectly reference his own exit hours later. Several outlets, including The Washington Post, Bloomberg News, and The Wall Street Journal, confirmed the rest of Platformer’s reporting throughout the day.
“Twitter is on life support,” Axios reporter Sara Fischer tweeted, adding that employees were telling her they think “it’s over” because “trust is gone.”
On Thursday morning, tech outlet The Verge shared the entirety of a Slack message announcing some of the resignations, purportedly posted to an internal company channel by a senior member of Twitter’s legal team the previous night.
“This news will be buried in the return-to-office drama,” the unidentified lawyer wrote, likely referring to a dire email sent by Musk at 2:30 a.m. Thursday ordering everyone back into the office for a minimum of 40 hours a week. “I believe that is intentional.”
“Elon has shown that his only priority with Twitter users is how to monetize them,” the note continued, with its author going on to say they had “heard Alex Spiro (current head of Legal) say that Elon is willing to take on a huge amount of risk in relation to this company and its users, because ‘Elon puts rockets into space, he’s not afraid of the FTC.’”
A spokesperson for the Federal Trade Commission told The Verge that agents were “tracking recent developments at Twitter with deep concern.” The agency has indicated that it is prepared to take action to make sure the new Chief Twit will keep his company in compliance with a consent order established in a deal earlier this year, which allowed the platform to settle allegations of past misconduct around data handling practices.
Three of Thursday’s resignations were by members of a data governance committee formed as a result of the FTC settlement, a former employee told the Post.
Earlier on Thursday, Musk warned staffers on a call that bankruptcy wasn’t “out of the question” for Twitter, having indicated in his first email to its (remaining) staff that “there is a good chance Twitter will not survive the upcoming economic downturn” without a significant jump in subscription revenue.
A finding of noncompliance by the FTC could push the company into deeper financial straits, with possible fines reaching into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Read it at The Verge
