Laid-off Twitter workers feared meager severance deals. Elon Musk just set the bar even lower

After months of waiting, hundreds of Twitter employees laid off by Elon Musk in early November received their separation agreements by email Saturday morning.

The agreements offered one month of severance pay, but with a major catch — employees must sign away their right to ever sue the company, assist anyone in a legal case against the company unless required by law, or speak negatively about Twitter, its management or Elon Musk.

More striking is what the document omitted, said one former engineering manager who was laid off Nov. 4. The separation agreement does not include year-end bonuses, cash contribution for healthcare continuation, additional severance based on tenure, or the cash value of restricted stock units that are typically vested every quarter. These were all part of Twitter’s general severance package prior to Musk’s acquisition of the company in October, according to a previous companywide email.

After opening the agreement, the manager said he immediately knew he was going to pursue legal action. So did many others in former employee groups in which he participates.

“There’s a lot of sentiment that Twitter did us wrong,” he said. “We don’t want to give them any free passes on anything.”

Lisa Bloom, a lawyer who already has filed arbitration claims against Musk on behalf of several laid-off employees, called the terms in the separation agreement “pretty disturbing.”

Not only are former employees barred from voluntarily assisting in legal cases against the company, they also must assist and cooperate with Twitter in any kind of investigation or lawsuit against the company.

Although they can still testify in cases under subpoena or court order, this clause can make it difficult to gather witnesses, said Shannon Liss-Riordan, a labor lawyer representing plaintiffs in three pending class-action lawsuits against the company.

Signees also cede their right to any payout in these class actions, which are listed along with Liss-Riordan's contact information. (A San Francisco judge ruled in December that Twitter had to acknowledge these suits in its severance letters.)

Twitter has moved to block former employees who signed arbitration agreements when they were hired from being able to benefit from these class-action suits. A federal judge will make a decision on the motion Thursday, Liss-Riordan said.

Liss-Riordan said her firm filed an additional 100 arbitration claims against Twitter on Monday, bringing the total to 300, with many workers reaching out since the separation agreements were sent out. With so many claims against the company, Liss-Riordan said it's likely that many of them will be resolved without going through the actual arbitration process for each individual case, which could take years.

Twitter, which no longer has a formal communications team, could not be reached for comment.

Another employee, a former product designer, said they ultimately signed the severance contract for personal reasons.

The offer, a copy of which The Times reviewed, states that the designer will be paid $17,250 in severance pay (minus withholdings, deductions and debts). Other employees have reportedly been offered the same amount.

However, that number gets slashed to $500 if the laid-off employee resigns, obtains another job at Twitter or gets fired for cause — such as violating the agreement — before their separation date.

“Twitter has also been sloppy with some details around this,” the laid-off designer said in an email. “Not everyone received it, and many people had wrong dates.”

For many, the separation agreement landed in their spam folders, increasing the initial confusion when they were first sent out. It also came from twitterseparation@cptgroup.com — an email sender no one recognized. (CPT Group is an Irvine-based firm that provides class-action settlement administrator services.)

The former engineering manager said some other ousted Twitter employees were able to confirm with what remains of Twitter’s HR department that the emails were legitimate.

Many employees whose roles were cut, including the designer, who was laid off in early November, have remained in a liminal state of “nonactive” employment since then: technically still part of the company and getting paid accordingly, but with no work to do or access to internal software. Although Musk’s reason for this has remained unclear, it’s probably an effort to comply with the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, a federal law requiring a 60-day notice period when companies make big cuts.

“Employees were [given few] details about the conditions of the ‘nonactive’ workforce,” wrote the outgoing designer, who will officially stop being employed Feb. 2. “Twitter never informed people that they were able to do other professional activities during this period of time. That says something about the lack of communication and how it can affect people who are looking for a new job.”

Twitter employees have been concerned about severance agreements long before layoffs began roiling the tech industry, affecting Lyft, Facebook and other companies. The state of the tech job market has meant a slow job search process for many ex-Twitter employees.

“I 100% would rather be interviewing right now than talking to lawyers,” the former engineering manager said. “There was always the hope … that Twitter would reconsider and be more generous, but clearly they did not choose that option.”

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

Microsoft kicks Twitter in the teeth

Connie Loizos@cookie / 6:39 PM EDT•April 19, 2023
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Image Credits: Jim Watson/AFP/ (collage by TechCrunch) / Getty Images

Microsoft is dropping Twitter from its advertising platform next week, nearly two months after Twitter announced that it will begin charging a minimum of $42,000 per month to users of its API, which include enterprises and research institutions.

Users began receiving emails about its new pricing details in early March, per a Wired report that observed at the time that the new pricing scheme “prices out nearly everyone.”

With its $2.15 trillion market cap and roughly $100 billion cash on hand at the end of last year, Microsoft obviously has the money to pay Twitter what it wants, so the move appears to be a bit of a statement, even as Microsoft is declining to elaborate further about its decision.

Specifically, what it told its customers today is that, “Starting on April 25, 2023, Smart Campaigns with Multi-platform will no longer support Twitter,” and that “Digital Marketing Center (DMC) will no longer support Twitter starting on April 25, 2023.”

The moves mean users will no longer be able to access their Twitter account, or create, schedule or otherwise manage tweets through Microsoft’s free social media management service.

As Mashable notes in a related report, companies that use Microsoft Advertising will still be able to manage and create content for Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn through the platform.

Unsurprisingly, Twitter owner Elon Musk finds the move galling, even threatening today on Twitter to take legal action.

Apparently referring to Microsoft’s licensing arrangement with the AI outfit OpenAI — which trained its powerful AI models on a “vast corpus of diverse text data from the internet,” per OpenAI’s own popular chatbot ChatGPT — Musk tweeted today of Microsoft’s decision, “They trained illegally using Twitter data. Lawsuit time.”

There is reason for some animus between Microsoft and Twitter. In addition to striking a licensing arrangement with OpenAI, Microsoft has invested many billions of dollars into OpenAI, which Musk co-founded in 2015 and left several years later. He has periodically bashed it since, including on Twitter. He also more recently announced he was planning a rival initiative.

Either way, the move comes at a lousy time for Musk, who has been more actively working to win over advertisers after reportedly losing more than half of Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers following his takeover of the platform in late October.

Just yesterday, he sat onstage in Miami with the chairman of global advertising and partnerships at NBCUniversal, reportedly saying during the interview that he is open to hearing legitimate concerns advertisers might have about Twitter but stressing he won’t make changes he doesn’t believe in.

Meanwhile, asked on Twitter today about Musk’s decision to charge so much for Twitter’s API access — one entrepreneur with his own controversial past noted that “in some cases,” the move is killing traffic to Twitter from outside sources — Musk responded, “I’m open to ideas, but ripping off the Twitter database, demonetizing it (removing ads) and then selling our data to others isn’t a winning solution.”

Blocked! French minister threatens to ban Twitter if it doesn’t follow EU rules

‘Twitter, if it repeatedly doesn’t follow our rules, will be banned from the EU,’ said France’s digital minister, Jean-Noël Barrot.


France's Digital Minister Jean-Noël Barrot waded into a growing tussle between the European Union and Elon Musk's Twitter on Monday, as he threatened the social media platform's access to the bloc.

In comments made on radio network France Info, the minister said that the U.S. company would be banned from the EU if it refused to follow the incoming European Digital Services Act, which goes into effect throughout the EU at the end of August.

"Disinformation is one of the gravest threats weighing on our democracies," said Barrot. "Twitter, if it repeatedly doesn't follow our rules, will be banned from the EU," the French minister added.

The remarks mark an escalation of an ongoing fight between European politicians and Twitter, which was bought last year by Elon Musk, the controversial billionaire who also controls Tesla and SpaceX.

Last week, POLITICO reported that the social media platform was withdrawing from the EU's voluntary disinformation code of practice.

The code spells out obligations for large digital platforms on tracking political advertising, clamping down on disinformation, and encouraging wider access and participation to outsiders. Other major social media platforms have pledged to support the rulebook, which is meant to pre-empt some of the measures that will become mandatory under the incoming Digital Services Act. The regulation foresees fines worth up to 6 percent of a company's annual revenue for rule-breakers.

Internal Markets Commissioner Thierry Breton tweeted "You can run but you can’t hide" in response to Twitter's decision to withdraw from the code.

"Disinformation is one of the gravest threats weighing on our democracies," said Barrot. "Twitter, if it repeatedly doesn't follow our rules, will be banned from the EU," the French minister added.

Twitter temporarily restricts tweets users can see, Elon Musk announces

Twitter has applied a temporary limit to the number of tweets users can read in a day, owner Elon Musk has said.

In a tweet of his own, Mr Musk said unverified accounts are now limited to reading 1,000 posts a day.

For new unverified accounts, the number is 500. Meanwhile, accounts with "verified" status are currently limited to 10,000 posts a day.

The tech billionaire initially set stricter limits, but he changed these within hours of announcing the move.

Mr Musk said the temporary limits were to address "extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation".

He did not explain what was meant by system manipulation in this context.

"We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users," Mr Musk explained on Friday, after users were presented with screens asking them to log in to view Twitter content.

The move was described as a "temporary emergency measure".

It is not totally clear what Mr Musk is referring to by data scraping, but it appears he means the scraping of large amounts of data used by artificial intelligence (AI) companies to train large language models, which power chatbots such as Open AI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard.

In simple terms, data scraping is the pulling of information from the internet. Large language models need to learn from masses of real human conversations. But the quality is vital to the success of a chatbot. Reddit and Twitter's huge trove of billions of posts are thought to be hugely important training data - and used by AI companies.

But platforms like Twitter and Reddit want to be paid for this data.

In April, Reddit's chief executive Steve Huffman told the New York Times that he was unhappy with what AI companies were doing.

"The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable," he said. "But we don't need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free."

Twitter has already started charging users to access its application programming interface (API), which is often used by third party apps and researchers - which can include AI companies.

There are other potential reasons for the move too.

Mr Musk has been pushing people towards Twitter Blue, its paid subscription service. It's possible he is looking at a model where users will have to pay to get a full Twitter service - and access to unlimited posts.

Signalled by a blue tick, "verified" status was given for free by Twitter to high-profile accounts before Mr Musk took over as its boss. Now, most users have to pay a subscription fee from $8 (£6.30) per month to be verified, and can gain the status regardless of their profile.

According to the website Downdetector - which tracks online outages - a peak of 5,126 people reported problems accessing the platform in the UK at 16:12 BST on Saturday.

In the US, roughly 7,461 people reported glitches around the same time.

Initially, Mr Musk announced reading limits of 6,000 posts per day for verified accounts, 600 for unverified accounts, and 300 for new unverified accounts.

In another update Mr Musk said "several hundred organisations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively".

He later indicated there had been a burden on his website, saying it was "rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis".

A server is a powerful computer that manages and stores files, providing services such as web pages for users.

Adam Leon Smith from BCS, the UK's professional body for IT, said the move was "very odd" as limiting users' scroll time would affect the company's advertising revenue.

Mr Musk bought the company last year for $44bn (£35bn) after much back and forth. He was critical of Twitter's previous management and said he did not want the platform to become an echo chamber.

Soon after taking over, he cut the workforce from just under 8,000 staff to about 1,500.

In an interview with the BBC, he said that cutting the workforce had not been easy.

Engineers were included in the layoffs and their exit raised concerns about the platform's stability.

But while Mr Musk acknowledged some glitches, he told the BBC in April that outages had not lasted very long and the site was working fine.


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