Twitter’s Australian team has been hard hit by Musk’s staff purge

Twitter Australia’s entire news curation team is among the thousands of staff who lost their jobs after billionaire Elon Musk sacked half the workforce a week after his US$44 billion private takeover.

The local Twitter team is less than 50 people, but around 20% of them worked in the news curation team. The job losses come after the company moved out of its Sydney HQ after the lease expired.

Last week, Twitter staff found themselves locked out of company systems ahead of the redundancies announcement

“In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce,” the company said in an email sent to all staff.

“We recognise 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.”

Just 48 hours on, reports are emerging that the business is now looking to rehire some of those it told were losing their jobs

From Twitter Slack: “sorry to @- everybody on the weekend but I wanted to pass along that we have the opportunity to ask folks that were left off if they will come back. I need to put together names and rationales by 4PM PST Sunday.

— Casey Newton (@CaseyNewton) November 6, 2022

Twitter’s Sydney-based Deputy Curation Lead, Global News, Katherine Gallo, said in a LinkedIn post that she, along with her entire team, had been laid off.

“I’m heartbroken because when I left my previous job at SBS I thought I wasn’t going to find another place I loved so much so quickly. But I did. It’s the people that made Twitter so special. What’s next for me? I’m not sure,” she said.

“My brilliant curation colleagues tackled misinformation, contextualised topics of interest, including breaking news, politics, health, social justice, sports, and entertainment, summarising complex conversations unfolding in real-time on Twitter. If you are recruiting multilingual curators, social media producers, writers, digital producers or journalists in Australia please get in touch, I have more than ten extremely smart folks that will be an asset to your team!”

ANZ head of sales at Twitter Jonathan Munschi also took to LinkedIn to try and find jobs for his former workers.

“These people I had the privilege to work with are some of the smartest, hard working, passionate individuals in the industry. We have incredible talents looking to start a new chapter across content, sales, marketing, and more,” he said.

“If you have positions available, I urge you to consider these legends. Please DM me any position available and I will connect you with them.”

Former client account manager Dylan Lockhart also finds himself seeking a new role after 3.5 years at Twitter.

“Unfortunately I’m one of the many who’s been impacted by the layoffs at Twitter. It’s been an amazing 3 and a half years and I’m sorry to see some brilliant and talented people I’ve worked with in the same boat,” he wrote on LinkedIn.

“If anyone knows of any marketing, account manager or brand roles opening in Melbourne please let me know!”

Meanwhile, Musk continues to rule Twitter as a personal fiefdom, today, nine days after declaring that “comedy is legal on Twitter” that anyone who impersonates someone on Twitter – many uses have changed their name to Elon Musk – will be banned from the site if they don’t mark it as parody.

Going forward, any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying “parody” will be permanently suspended

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 6, 2022

He’s also rolling out US$8 a month verification, including in Australia, saying it will “democratize journalism & empower the voice of the people”.

Financial Times journalist Dave Lee nailed the Twitter zeitgeist.

So far, every Musk comment/policy has been directly related to his own personal experience on Twitter and little else.

— Dave Lee (@DaveLeeFT) November 6, 2022