Twitter Quietly Shuffles Its Health Dept. After Ex-Cybersec Head Blows The Whistle
Twitter has been the talk of the town lately for all the wrong reasons. After Elon Musk’s buyout attempt, a lot of restructuring happened at the company, with senior leaders like Kayvon Beykpour and Bruce Falck being relieved from the company. Amid this chaos, Elon asked Twitter to supply accurate data on the number of spam accounts. Twitter did supply the data, but he wasn’t convinced with the 5% estimate and claimed it could be 20%.
Now, Twitter has merged its health department and services department. The health department oversees reducing misinformation and harmful content, while the services division deals with user reports and spam accounts. Its new division will be called Health Products and Services (HPS), Reuters reported.
Why did Twitter merge the two departments?
According to insider information that Reuters obtained, the workforce from these two teams diminished over the last few months. By combining the two divisions, Twitter would distribute the workload as well as save the burden of hiring a new workforce. Previously, Twitter and many other Tech giants revealed that the hiring will be reduced for this year. Ella Irwin, who is the vice president of product for health and Twitter service, will lead the HPS team.
It appears to be a strategic move because U.S. midterm elections are nearing, and that means a significant increase in hate speech and spam accounts. Hopefully, the new HPS team will work better in combating spam and misinformation on the platform. A former security engineer revealed that Twitter’s spam and misinformation combating systems were inferior to what it claimed.
A former employee shared that the current approach and workforce were incapable of combating the level of misinformation prevalent on the platform. He doubted that the reshuffling will make it any better. Regardless, Twitter is hoping to improve its revenue and sue Elon Musk for backing out of the deal. But Elon’s reasons appear somewhat real as many are pointing out the inherent flaws of spam control on the popular micro-blogging site.
