Twitter’s head of trust and safety says she has resigned, the latest sign that the company is struggling to retain advertisers as brands become wary of appearing next to harmful content. Ella Irwin, who joined the company in June 2022 and took over as head of the trust and safety team in November when previous head Yoel Roth resigned, oversaw content moderation. She told Reuters on Thursday that she was leaving to pursue other opportunities. Her departure is effective immediately, the company said.
Irwin’s exit comes amid controversy over Twitter’s lax protections against harmful speech. It has faced criticism for its lack of efforts to prevent suicide, child exploitation, misinformation, and the proliferation of anti-Semitic tweets and other forms of abuse.
Twitter’s leadership struggle has deepened since billionaire Elon Musk acquired the company in October. He has publicly clashed with Twitter employees and criticized its policies. Those comments have raised fears that he will push the company to weaken its efforts to prevent abuse and misinformation.
The controversy has spooked major advertisers and led to online harassment for former Twitter executives. Musk has tried to calm concerns by saying he has no intention of turning the site into a free-for-all hellscape. But the site has been plagued by problems and staffing cuts since his acquisition.
In December, Twitter cut staff in the trust and safety department by more than a quarter, according to a report from Reuters. The move was part of a more extensive overhaul that included disbanding an advisory group on child sexual exploitation, hate speech, and self-harm.
One of the most significant changes was removing an entire team that had worked on investigating and blocking accounts used to promote sexual violence against women. The departures were part of a more significant effort to streamline the platform’s operations, including reorganizing teams and consolidating low-traffic areas.
Another change was to stop letting users opt out of Twitter’s automatic language filters, which are designed to block profanity and other offensive terms. The move responded to complaints from some users that the filters were censoring too much.
In an email to the company’s staff, which Reuters obtained, Irwin wrote that she is leaving because she believes “Twitter is doing the right thing” and a new leader will be named soon. She also reassured the team that the company would continue to enforce its rules against hate speech, threats, and other violations of Twitter’s terms of service. However, in a Twitter post on Thursday, Irwin seemed to contradict her statement from the email. Instead, she tweeted that the company would not stop enforcing policies against targeting transgender people for harassment. It also will continue to enforce a ban on displaying offensive or explicit images of children and reaffirm that the company is committed to protecting its users’ privacy, among other things. Irwin declined to comment further, and Twitter didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Fortune.