It had been a long pandemic for Twitter\u2019s research team. Tasked with solving some of the platform\u2019s toughest problems around harassment, extremism, and disinformation, staffers absconded to Napa Valley in November 2021 for a company retreat. Despite a tumultuous change in leadership \u2014 Jack Dorsey had recently stepped down, appointing former chief technology officer Parag Agrawal to take his place \u2014 the group felt unified, even hopeful. After months of fighting bad actors online, employees took a moment to unwind. \u201cWe finally felt like we had a cohesive team,\u201d one researcher says.<\/p>\n

But at the goodbye brunch on the last day, people\u2019s phones started pinging with alarming news: their boss, Dantley Davis, Twitter\u2019s vice president of design, had been fired. Nobody knew it was coming. \u201cIt was like a movie,\u201d says one attendee, who asked to remain anonymous because they are not authorized to speak publicly about the company. \u201cPeople started crying. I was just sitting there eating a croissant being like, \u2018What\u2019s up with the mood?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The news foreshadowed a downward spiral for the research organization. Although the group was used to reorganizations, a shakeup in the middle of an outing meant to bond the team together felt deeply symbolic.<\/p>\n

The turmoil came to a head in April, when Elon Musk signed a deal to buy Twitter. Interviews with current and former employees, along with 70 pages of internal documents, suggest the chaos surrounding Musk\u2019s acquisition pushed some teams to the breaking point, prompting numerous health researchers to quit, with some saying their colleagues were told to deprioritize projects to fight extremism in favor of focusing on bots and spam. The Musk deal might not even go through, but the effects on Twitter\u2019s health efforts are already clear.<\/p>\n

The health team, once tasked with fostering civil conversations on the famously uncivil platform, went from 15 full-time staffers down to two.<\/p>\n

In 2019, Jack Dorsey asked a fundamental question about the platform he had helped create: \u201cCan we actually measure the health of the conversation?\u201d<\/p>\n

Onstage at a TED conference in Vancouver, the beanie-clad CEO talked earnestly about investing in automated systems to proactively detect bad behavior and \u201ctake the burden off the victim completely.\u201d<\/p>\n

That summer, the company began staffing up a team of health researchers to carry out Dorsey\u2019s mission. His talk convinced people who\u2019d been working in academia, or for larger tech companies like Meta, to join Twitter, inspired by the prospect of working toward positive social change. <\/p>\n