Twitter is without a moderator for the second time within a period of less than one year. On Thursday Ella Irwin resigned as the head of Twitter’s Trust and Safety department just under 7 months after taking the job.
Irwin Reuters has confirmed that the story is trueThe spokesman did not make any other comments. Fortune first reported her resignation when it learned she was no longer included as part of Twitter’s internal Slack.
Irwin joined Twitter in June, 2022 in a different role, but took over as the head of Trust and Safety in early November, after the division’s previous boss, Yoel Roth, quit just 2 weeks after the company was acquired by Elon Musk.
At the time, Roth alluded to the slapdash way Musk managed the company from the start, writing in a New York Times editorial that “a Twitter whose policies are defined by unilateral edict has little need for a trust and safety function.”
Criticism at the time was concerned that Twitter, under Musk, would again be a refuge for hate-speech and harassment. Fears that were soon realized as there appeared to be a spike of racist speech and other bigoted forms on Twitter.
Since then Musk has personally seen to it that hundreds of accounts that had been banned for violations of Twitter’s policies, including not only Donald Trump, but also, among others, A white supremacist in the literal sense. Twitter lost half its largest advertisers in the following months, which experts attribute to fears about offensive content on Twitter.
Neither Twitter nor Musk have made a public statement about Irwin’s exit and she has turned down media requests to explain why she quit. But it’s one more headache that new Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino will have to deal with.
The auto-response to a Twitter email was a poop emoticon.