The tanking Big Tech economy has finally reached the fact-checkers and “hate speech” moderators who are now suffering the same fate as their counterparts amid massive layoffs.
Before the layoffs, Big Tech companies went on a hiring spree throughout the pandemic, appointing so-called “hate speech,” misinformation police and fact-checkers to ensure dissenting voices challenging the narrative were instantly silenced.
But it looks like the era of censorship is about to come to a grinding halt, as Joe Biden’s awful economy is now forcing many big tech companies to offload thousands of staff.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced he would fire 10,000 employees earlier this year, equating to 13 percent of its workforce.
The move came months after Google’s parent company, Alphabet, announced it would axe 12,000 jobs.
The Daily Fetched reported that Amazon’s layoffs impacted more than 18,000 employees, the highest number for a major tech company.
Now the fact-checkers are about to get hit.
CNBC reports:
Toward the end of 2022, engineers on Meta’s team combating misinformation were ready to debut a key fact-checking tool that had taken half a year to build. The company needed all the reputational help it could get after a string of crises had badly damaged the credibility of Facebook and Instagram and given regulators additional ammunition to bear down on the platforms.
The new product would let third-party fact-checkers like The Associated Press and Reuters, as well as credible experts, add comments at the top of questionable articles on Facebook as a way to verify their trustworthiness.
But CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s commitment to make 2023 the “year of efficiency” spelled the end of the ambitious effort, according to three people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named due to confidentiality agreements.
Over multiple rounds of layoffs, Meta announced plans to eliminate roughly 21,000 jobs, a mass downsizing that had an outsized effect on the company’s trust and safety work. The fact-checking tool, which had initial buy-in from executives and was still in a testing phase early this year, was completely dissolved, the sources said…
Across the tech industry, as companies tighten their belts and impose hefty layoffs to address macroeconomic pressures and slowing revenue growth, wide swaths of people tasked with protecting the internet’s most-populous playgrounds are being shown the exits.
The liberals were not happy about this news.
But it’s not just tech, its also leftist publications feeling the heat.
Earlier this month, a slew of leftist news outlets including Buzzfeed announced they will shut down.
BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti said that the move was a part of slashing 15 percent of staff amid the economic downturn hitting big tech forcing them to shut down.
“While layoffs are occurring across nearly every division, we’ve determined that the company can no longer continue to fund BuzzFeed News as a standalone organization,” he wrote to staff in an email
As the tech industry continues to get pummelled by the rough economy, the headcount reductions have are showing no signs of slowing down.
READ: Google Engineer Jumps to His Death from 14th Floor of Company’s NYC Office
