Twitter has disbanded its complete Brussels office, in line with media reports, raising questions about the social media business enterprise’s compliance with new EU legal guidelines to control large tech.
Julia Mozer and Dario La Nasa, who have been in price of Twitter’s virtual policy in Europe, left the business enterprise final week, the Financial Times said.
The pair had survived an initial cull while Elon Musk laid off thousands of personnel following his takeover last month. It is unclear whether Mozer and La Nasa were made redundant or chose to leave in reaction to Musk’s ultimatum to decide to working long “extremely hardcore” hours or quit.
Neither changed into it clean whether or not Twitter turned into last its workplace inside the European capital, one of the international’s biggest centres of tech regulation.Questions to Twitter’s press workplace went unanswered, even as Moser and La Nasa did now not immediately respond to messages.
In the first spherical of layoffs, Twitter sacked approximately 1/2 its 7,500 personnel, dissolving whole teams, consisting of human rights, system studying and algorithmic ethics. Among the hundreds who lost their jobs became the top of the Brussels office, Stephen Turner. He tweeted on 14 November: “After 6 years I am formally retired from Twitter. From starting the office in Brussels to constructing an awesome team it’s been an incredible experience.”
The collapse of the small Brussels crew has raised questions about the corporation’s ability to implement new rules meant to rein within the electricity of big tech and limit hate speech. EU officers are stated to have many contacts primarily based in Dublin, in which Twitter has its European headquarters, despite the fact that that workplace has also faced 50% cuts. “I can confirm that we’ve lively and ongoing contacts with Twitter (and different platforms) on specific topics,” a European Commission spokesperson said.
Senior officers have expressed self belief that the departures at the Brussels workplace do not threaten Twitter’s ability to comply with key EU legal guidelines affecting large tech corporations.
The news came as the commission revealed that Twitter – together with maximum other tech businesses – had turn out to be slower in responding to hate speech reviews. In 2016, massive social media groups agreed to a code of conduct with the EU executive, pledging to assess maximum notifications of hate speech in less than 24 hours. In a seven-week period this year, Twitter assessed best 54% of notifications inside 24 hours, as part of a fashionable performance decline through maximum signatories to the code.The corporation will also need to grapple with the EU’s Digital Markets Act, a landmark regulation meant to slash the dominance of big systems that got here into pressure this month.
