Twitter loses second trust and safety chief since Elon Musk takeover

Ella Irwin is the second person to leave the role since Elon Musk purchased the social media platform late last year, following Yoel Roth.

Twitter’s head of trust and safety has resigned from the social media company, according to a report.

Ella Irwin told Reuters news agency she had resigned, not long after Fortune reported her internal Slack account appeared to have been deactivated.

Ms Irwin oversaw content moderation – a controversial subject for a company that has been criticised for lax protection against harmful content since billionaire Elon Musk took over in October.

Soon after Musk took over, he sacked half of the company’s 8,000 workers, including around 15% of the trust and safety department.

The department’s then-head Yoel Roth resigned in Novemberand was replaced by Ms Irwin.

Under Musk’s leadership, there have been mixed efforts at moderating inappropriate and inaccurate content.

He has been promoting a new feature called Community Notes, which lets users provide additional context to tweets in a bid to tackle disinformation.

But he also changed the platform’s verification system so that its blue ticks are now subscription-only,  instead of a marker of authenticity or notability.

In December, he oversaw the dissolution of Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council – an advisory group of nearly 100 independent civil, human rights and other organisations formed in 2016 to address hate speech, child exploitation, suicide, self-harm and other problems on the platform.

Throughout the months of Musk’s stewardship, some of Twitter’s advertisers have pulled away, wary of being seen next to unsuitable content.