On Friday, Twitter’s head of trust and safety said she was leaving the company. Her decision to leave came after Twitter owner Elon Musk liked a video on the site that was against transgender people.
“I know there’s been a lot of talk about what happened,” Ella Irwin wrote on Twitter late Friday, a day after her exit was reported in US news outlets.
“I did resign, but this has been a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” she said, without saying why she left her job at Twitter so suddenly.
Irwin is the second head of trust and safety to leave Twitter since the strange billionaire Musk bought it and made it so that almost anything that is legal can be posted.
Since he took over Twitter in late October, Musk has done a lot to stir up trouble. He fired most of the company’s employees, let banned accounts back on the platform, suspended journalists, and started charging for services that used to be free.
Musk told CNBC in May that he would keep tweeting his uncensored thoughts even if it hurt his businesses.
“I don’t care,” the billionaire said when asked how he felt about the fact that his controversial tweets made it harder to sell ads on Twitter and hurt the share price of Tesla, the company he owns that makes electric cars.
“I’ll say what I want to say, and if losing money is the result, so be it.”
Irwin left Twitter at a time when supporters of an anti-transgender video called “What Is a Woman?” were putting pressure on the company. They said Twitter broke a deal to let them share the video for free on the platform.
People who liked the video said that it wasn’t being shown on Twitter because it didn’t use people’s preferred names when it came to identifying their gender.
Musk told the right outlet that made the video on Twitter that people had made a mistake and that the video, even though it might be “rude,” was not illegal.
As of late Friday, a link to the video with the words “Every parent should watch this” was at the top of Musk’s Twitter feed.
US news sources say that at least one other high-level Twitter employee left after the event.
Just a few weeks from now, a well-known media and advertising executive named Linda Yaccarino will replace Musk as Twitter’s CEO.
Musk’s moves have scared off advertisers, and many of them have left the platform out of fear that their goods will be linked to disturbing content.
Since Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, its value has dropped due to the return of far-right figures and users’ loss of trust.
