Head of Twitter’s Content Moderation Leaves Company


Ella Irwin, who was in charge of trust and safety at Twitter, told Reuters on Thursday that she had quit. Since billionaire Elon Musk bought the company in October, Twitter has been criticized for not protecting users from harmful material.

Irwin joined Twitter in June 2022. When Yoel Roth quit his job as head of the trust and safety team in November, Irwin took over. She was in charge of editing the text.

An automatic response with a poop emoji was sent back when an email was sent to Twitter. Irwin didn’t want to say anything else, and Musk didn’t say anything right away when asked.

Irwin’s departure comes at a time when the platform has had trouble keeping advertisers because brands don’t want to be seen next to inappropriate material.

Musk said earlier this month that he had hired Linda Yaccarino, who was the head of ads at NBCUniversal, to be the new CEO of Twitter.

Fortune said earlier that it looked like Irwin’s internal Slack account had been turned off.

Since Musk bought Twitter, the company has drastically cut costs and let go of thousands of workers, many of whom had worked to stop harmful and illegal content, protect the integrity of elections, and make sure that correct information was easy to find on the site.

Musk has pushed for a Twitter feature called “Community Notes,” which lets people add context to tweets. This is meant to stop false information from spreading on Twitter.

The company’s moderation attempts are also getting more attention from the government. Twitter left a voluntary deal with the European Union to stop spreading false information, but it said it would still follow the EU’s new rules for the internet.

Last week, Thierry Breton, the head of industry for the EU, told Twitter that it could not get out of legal responsibilities in the EU just because it left the voluntary agreement.