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Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk is further gutting the teams that battle misinformation on the social media platform as outsourced moderators learned over the weekend they were out of a job.

Twitter and other big social media firms have relied heavily on contractors to track hate and enforce rules against harmful content.

But many of those content watchdogs have now headed out the door, first when Twitter fired much of its full-time workforce by email on Nov. 4 and now as it moves to eliminate an untold number of contract jobs.

Melissa Ingle, who worked at Twitter as a contractor for more than a year, was one of a number of contractors who said they were terminated Saturday. She said she’s concerned that there’s going to be an increase in abuse on Twitter with the number of workers leaving.

“I love the platform and I really enjoyed working at the company and trying to make it better. And I’m just really fearful of what’s going to slip through the cracks,” she said Sunday.

Ingle, a data scientist, said she worked on the data and monitoring arm of Twitter’s civic integrity team. Her job involved writing algorithms to find political misinformation on the platform in countries such as the U.S., Brazil, Japan, Argentina and elsewhere.

Ingle said she was “pretty sure I was done for” when she couldn’t access her work email Saturday. The notification from the contracting company she’d been hired by came two hours later.

“I’ll just be putting my resumes out there and talking to people,” she said. “I have two children. And I’m worried about being able to give them a nice Christmas, you know, and just mundane things like that, that are important. I just think it’s particularly heartless to do this at this time.”

Content-moderation expert Sarah Roberts, an associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles who worked as a staff researcher at Twitter earlier this year, said she believes at least 3,000 contract workers were fired Saturday night.

Twitter hasn’t said how many contract workers it cut. The company hasn’t responded to media requests for information since Musk took over.

At Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters and other offices, contract workers wore green badges while full-time workers wore blue badges. Contractors did a number of jobs to help keep Twitter running, including engineering and marketing, Roberts said. But it was the huge force of contracted moderators that was “mission critical” to the platform, said Roberts.

Cutting them will have a “tangible impact on the experience of the platform,” she said.

Musk promised to loosen speech restrictions when he took over Twitter. But in the early days after Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in late October and dismissed its board of directors and top executives, the billionaire Tesla CEO sought to assure civil rights groups and advertisers that the platform could continue tamping down hate and hate-fueled violence.

That message was reiterated by Twitter’s then-head of content moderation, Yoel Roth, who tweeted that the Nov. 4 layoffs only affected “15% of our Trust & Safety organization (as opposed to approximately 50% cuts company-wide), with our front-line moderation staff experiencing the least impact.”

Roth has since resigned from the company, joining an exodus of high-level leaders who were tasked with privacy protection, cybersecurity and complying with regulations.
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The imploding cryptocurrency trading firm FTX is now short billions of dollars after experiencing the crypto equivalent of a bank run.

The exchange, formerly one of the world’s largest, sought bankruptcy protection last week, and its CEO and founder resigned. Hours later, the trading firm said there had been “unauthorized access” and that funds had disappeared. Analysts say hundreds of millions of dollars may have vanished.

The unraveling of the once-giant exchange is sending shockwaves through the industry. Here’s a look at the company’s collapse so far:

Why did FTX go bankrupt?

Customers fled the exchange over fears about whether FTX had sufficient capital, and it agreed to sell itself to rival crypto exchange Binance. But the deal fell through pending Binance’s due diligence on FTX’s balance sheet.

FTX had valued its assets between $10 billion to $50 billion and listed more than 130 affiliated companies around the world, according to its bankruptcy filing.

FTX and dozens of affiliated companies — including CEO Sam Bankman-Fried’s hedge fund, Alameda Research — filed the bankruptcy petition in Delaware on Friday.

This week’s developments marked a shocking turn of events for Bankman-Fried, who was hailed as somewhat of a savior earlier this year when he helped shore up a number of cryptocurrency companies that ran into financial trouble. He was recently estimated to be worth $23 billion and has been a prominent political donor to Democrats.

Was it hacked, too?

FTX confirmed Saturday there had been unauthorized access to its accounts, hours after the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

A debate formed on social media about whether the exchange was hacked or a company insider had stolen funds — a possibility that cryptocurrency analysts couldn’t rule out.

Exactly how much money is involved is unclear, but analytics firm Elliptic estimated Saturday that $477 million was missing from the exchange. FTX’s new CEO John Ray III said it was switching off the ability to trade or withdraw funds and taking steps to secure customers’ assets.

Is FTX under investigation?

The Royal Bahamas Police Force said Sunday it is investigating FTX, adding to the company’s woes. The police force said in a statement Sunday it was working with Bahamas securities regulators to “investigate if any criminal misconduct occurred” involving the exchange, which had moved its headquarters to the Caribbean country last year.

Is anyone else investigating?

Even before the bankruptcy filing and missing funds, the U.S. Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission began examining FTX to determine whether any criminal activity or securities offenses were committed, according to a person familiar with matter who spoke to The Associated Press last week on condition of anonymity because they could not discuss details of the investigations publicly.

What are the repercussions?

Companies that backed FTX are writing down investments, and the prices of bitcoin and other digital currencies have been falling. Politicians and regulators are calling for stricter oversight of the unwieldy industry. FTX said Saturday that it was moving as many digital assets as can be identified to a new “cold wallet custodian,” which is essentially a way of storing assets offline without allowing remote control.

FTX had also entered into a number of sports-related deals, some of which are crumbling. The NBA’s Miami Heat and Miami-Dade County decided Friday to terminate their relationship with FTX and will rename the team’s arena. Earlier Friday, Mercedes said it would immediately remove FTX logos from its Formula One cars.
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The collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX is the subject of scrutiny from government investigators in the Bahamas, who are looking at whether any “criminal misconduct occurred,” the Royal Bahamas Police said on Sunday.

FTX filed for bankruptcy on Friday, one of the highest-profile crypto blowups, after traders rushed to withdraw $6 billion from the platform in just 72 hours and rival exchange Binance abandoned a proposed rescue deal.

In a statement on Sunday, the Royal Bahamas Police said: “In light of the collapse of FTX globally and the provisional liquidation of FTX Digital Markets Ltd., a team of financial investigators from the Financial Crimes Investigation Branch are working closely with the Bahamas Securities Commission to investigate if any criminal misconduct occurred.”

FTX did not respond to Reuters’ request for comment.

FTX’s newly appointed Chief Executive John J. Ray III, a restructuring expert who took over after the bankruptcy filing, said on Saturday that the company was working with law enforcement and regulators to mitigate the problem, and was making “every effort to secure all assets, wherever located.”

The exchange’s dramatic fall from grace has seen its 30-year-old founder Sam Bankman-Fried, known for his shorts and T-shirt attire, morph from being the poster child of crypto’s successes to the protagonist of the industry’s biggest crash. 

Bankman-Fried, who lives in the Bahamas, has also been the subject of speculation about his whereabouts and he denied rumors on Twitter that he had flown to South America. When asked by Reuters on Saturday whether he had flown to Argentina, he responded in a text message: “Nope.” He told Reuters he was in the Bahamas.

The turmoil at FTX has seen at least $1 billion of customer funds vanish from the platform, sources told Reuters on Friday. Bankman-Fried had transferred $10 billion of customer funds to his trading company, Alameda Research, the sources said.

New problems emerged on Saturday when FTX’s U.S. general counsel Ryne Miller said in a Twitter post that the firm’s digital assets were being moved into so-called cold storage “to mitigate damage upon observing unauthorized transactions.”

Cold storage refers to crypto wallets that are not connected to the internet to guard against hackers.

Blockchain analytics firm Nansen said on Saturday it saw $659 million in outflows from FTX International and FTX U.S. in the preceding 24 hours.

Crypto exchange Kraken said on Twitter on Sunday that it froze the accounts of FTX, Alameda Research and their executives in order “to protect its creditors.”

The exchange did not immediately reply to a request for comment on the holdings of those accounts.

In its bankruptcy petition, FTX Trading said it has $10 billion to $50 billion in assets, $10 billion to $50 billion in liabilities, and more than 100,000 creditors.

A document that Bankman-Fried shared with investors on Thursday and was reviewed by Reuters showed FTX had $13.86 billion in liabilities and $14.6 billion in assets. However, only $900 million of those assets were liquid, leading to the cash crunch that ended with the company filing for bankruptcy.

The collapse shocked investors and prompted fresh calls to regulate the cryptoasset sector, which has seen losses stack up this year as cryptocurrency prices collapsed.

Bitcoin BTC=BTSP fell below $16,000 for the first time since 2020 on Wednesday, after Binance abandoned its rescue deal for FTX.

On Sunday it was trading around $16,400, down by more than 75% from the all-time high of $69,000 it reached in November last year.
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German Chancellor Olaf Scholz discussed energy and trade ties with Vietnam’s Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh during a visit to Hanoi on Sunday, the first for a German leader in more than a decade.

Scholz’s stop in Vietnam on his way to the G20 leaders’ summit in Indonesia, highlights Vietnam’s growing role in global supply chains as many German firms consider diversifying their manufacturing operations by expanding their presence beyond China, their main hub in Asia.

At a joint news conference with Chinh, Scholz said Berlin wanted deeper trade relations with Vietnam and would support the country’s transition to a greener economy, including through the expansion of the metro system in Hanoi, Vietnam’s capital.

The Hanoi visit follows Scholz’s trip to China last week, the first by a Western leader in three years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. He will next visit Singapore before heading to the G20 summit on Nov 15-16.

Vietnam and Singapore are the only countries in Southeast Asia that have a free trade agreement with the European Union. As a result, they are the EU’s biggest trading partners in the region.

Germany is Vietnam’s second-largest trading partner among EU states after the Netherlands, with exchanges worth $7.8 billion last year, according to law firm Dezan Shira — far less however than the United States, China, Japan and South Korea.

About 500 German firms operate in Vietnam, of which around 80 have manufacturing plants in the country, according to the German chamber of commerce in Vietnam, AHK.

Among them are engineering giant Bosch BOSH.NS, energy firm Messer, and several smaller companies involved in the global automotive supply chain.

Many more are looking to diversify some of their activities away from China where about 5,000 German companies operate, AHK head in Vietnam, Marko Walde, told Reuters.

Over 90% of German firms planning such a move look at Southeast Asia as their preferred choice, Walde said, noting that Vietnam and Thailand were favorites in the region.

 
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Britain’s government on Sunday warned of impending tax hikes, especially for the wealthy, as it bids to repair economic havoc wrought by the short-lived tenure of former prime minister Liz Truss.

Truss’s successor Rishi Sunak, who was heading to a G20 economic summit in Indonesia, has vowed to get soaring inflation under control even if it means more pain for hard-pressed consumers and businesses.

His finance minister, Jeremy Hunt, told Sky News that the pain would fall disproportionately on the better off as he prepares to unveil an emergency budget statement on Thursday.

Hunt conceded that the UK economy was already likely in recession, “but we are a resilient country and we’ve faced much bigger challenges, frankly, in our history.

“We’re all going to be paying a bit more tax, I’m afraid,” he said, while refusing to be drawn into detail on the figures, after a tax-cutting budget by Truss caused panic on financial markets.

“We will be asking everyone for sacrifices,” the chancellor of the exchequer stressed.

“But I think in a fair society, as we are in the UK, we need to recognize that there’s only so much you can ask from people on the very lowest incomes, so that will be reflected in the decisions that I take.”

Hunt is reportedly looking at changing income tax brackets, to raise more revenue from high earners, and impose strict curbs on government spending for years to come as inflation hits double digits.

He said the surge in energy prices linked to the war in Ukraine amounted to an economic hit of $166 billion.

“It’s like the economy supporting an entire second NHS [National Health Service],” the minister said.

“This will be a plan to help bring down inflation, help control high energy prices and also get our way back to growing healthily, which is what we need so much.”
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