In new disclosures to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Big Tech companies revealed the details around deep cuts made to trust and safety departments across the industry in recent years.
The CEOs of X, Snap and Discord all revealed cuts to their trust and safety teams — units at tech companies tasked with monitoring and moderating safety risks on the platforms — according to written responses from tech CEOs published by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday.
Meta and TikTok did not provide historical information to the committee about their trust and safety staffing despite requests to do so, but previous reporting indicates that Meta has also made cuts to those teams’ staff during the same time period. TikTok also reportedly conducted layoffs this year.
The numbers, some of which have not previously been disclosed, come on the heels of the January hearing where senators grilled social media executives about child safety issues. Despite the CEOs’ reassurances that the companies were laser-focused on platform safety issues, the numbers show that the majority of the platforms have chosen to scale back their trust and safety operations — even under the dangling sword of potential regulation and ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
In response to a question from Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., asking for the number of trust and safety personnel employed by the company over the past five years, X provided data for three years. The numbers showed a consistent decline in trust and safety personnel at the company over the last two years.
“X had 3317 Trust and Safety employees and contractors in May 2022, and 2849 in May 2023,” X replied. “Today, we have approximately 2300 people working on Trust and Safety matters and are building a Trust and Safety Center of Excellence in Austin, Texas, in an effort to bring more agent capacity in-house and rely less on outside contractors.”
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