Gigi Hadid became one of the hundreds of thousands to leave Twitter following Elon Musk’s takeover of the social media platform. The model announced her decision on Instagram over the weekend, sharing an IG post that revealed Twitter’s human rights team had been laid off Friday.
Musk infamously made deep cuts to the company, laying off more than 3,000 employees on Friday. (Now, Bloomberg reports, Twitter is offering dozens of them their jobs back, some because “management realized that their work and experience may be necessary to build the new features Musk envisions,” Bloomberg wrote, per its sources.)
Hadid shared a screenshot of former Twitter Human Rights Counsel Shannon Raj Singh’s tweet in her post. Singh wrote on Friday, “Yesterday was my last day at Twitter: the entire Human Rights team has been cut from the company. I am enormously proud of the work we did to implement the UN Guiding Principles on Business & Human Rights, to protect those at-risk in global conflicts & crises including Ethiopia, Afghanistan, and Ukraine, and to defend the needs of those particularly at risk of human rights abuse by virtue of their social media presence, such as journalists & human rights defenders.”
Hadid added her own comment at the end, explaining why exactly she deactivated her own account. “I deactivated my Twitter today,” she started. “For a long time, but especially with its new leadership, it’s becoming more and more of a cesspool of hate and bigotry, and it’s not a place I want to be a part of.”
“Only sorry to the fans who I’ve loved connecting with for a decade via Twitter, but I can’t say it’s a safe place for anyone nor a social platform that will do more good than harm.”
