Twitter’s director of trust and safety verified her resignation on Friday after platform owner Elon Musk backed an anti-transgender video shared on the platform.
“I know there’s been a lot of speculation regarding what happened,” Ella Irwin tweeted late Friday night, a day after her resignation was reported in US media.
“I did resign, but this has been a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” she said, without elaborating on the cause for her abrupt departure from Twitter.
Irwin is the second director of trust and safety to leave Twitter since eccentric billionaire Musk purchased the platform and essentially deactivated content moderation.
Musk has repeatedly courted controversy since assuming control of Twitter in late October, firing the majority of its employees, reinstating prohibited accounts on the platform, suspending journalists, and charging for previously free services.
Musk told CNBC in May that he will speak his mind even if it hurts his business.
When asked what he thought of his controversial statements making it more difficult to sell advertisements on Twitter and harming Tesla’s stock price, the billionaire replied, “I don’t care.”
“I’ll say what I want to say, and if losing money is the result, so be it.”
Irwin’s departure occurred at a time when Twitter was under duress from supporters of an anti-transgender video titled “What Is A Woman” who claimed Twitter violated an agreement to disseminate the content for free on the platform.
Supporters of the video claimed that Twitter was suppressing it because it did not use the preferred pronouns for gender identification.
Musk stated in a Twitter exchange with the conservative outlet responsible for the video that people had made an error and that the video, despite being potentially “rude,” was not illegal.
Musk’s Twitter account had a post for the video titled “Every parent should watch this” at the top as of late Friday.
According to US media reports, at least one other high-level Twitter executive departed the company following the incident.
The controversy arises just weeks before respected media and advertising executive Linda Yaccarino succeeds Musk as Twitter’s CEO.
Musk’s actions have frightened advertisers, many of whom have abandoned the platform out of concern that their products may be associated with offensive content.
Since Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, its value has plummeted with the return of far-right figures and loss of trust by users.