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Tag Archives: exodus
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Twitter Exodus Hits Teams Tasked With Regulatory, Content Issues Globally
Elon Musk’s
move to purge Twitter Inc. employees who don’t embrace his vision has led to a wave of departures among policy and safety-issue staffers around the globe, sparking questions from regulators in key jurisdictions about the site’s continued compliance efforts.
Scrutiny has been particularly close in Europe, where officials have in recent years assumed a greater role in regulating big tech companies.
Staff departures in recent days include dozens of people spread across units such as government policy, legal affairs and Twitter’s “trust and safety” division, which is responsible for functions like drafting content-moderation rules, according to current and former employees, postings on social media and emails sent to work addresses of people who had worked at Twitter that recently bounced back. They have left from hubs including Dublin, Singapore and San Francisco.
Many of the departures follow Mr. Musk’s ultimatum late last week that staffers pledge to work long hours and be “extremely hardcore” or take a buyout. Hundreds or more employees declined to commit to what Mr. Musk has called Twitter 2.0 and were locked out of company systems. That comes after layoffs in early November that cut roughly half of the company’s staff.
Twitter conducted another round of job cuts affecting engineers late Wednesday, before the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S., people familiar with the matter said. The exact scope couldn’t be immediately learned, though some of the people estimated dozens of employees were let go.
Twitter sent fired engineers an email saying their code wasn’t satisfactory and offering four weeks of severance, some of the people said. Some other engineers received an email warning them to improve their performance to keep their jobs, the people said.
Ireland’s Data Protection Commission said this week it was asking Twitter whether it still had sufficient staff to assure compliance with the European Union’s privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR. The company last week told the Irish data regulator that it did, but is still reviewing the impact of the staff departures, a spokesman for the Irish regulator said.
He said Twitter has appointed an interim chief data protection officer, an obligation under the GDPR, after the departure of Damien Kieran, who had served in the role but left shortly after the first round of layoffs.
In France, meanwhile, the country’s communications regulator said it sent a letter last Friday asking that Twitter explain by this week whether it has sufficient personnel on staff to moderate hate speech deemed illegal under French law—under which Twitter could face legal orders and fines.
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The staff departures come as Twitter holds talks with the EU about the bloc’s new social-media law, dubbed the Digital Services Act, which will apply tougher rules on bigger platforms like Twitter by the middle of next year.
Didier Reynders,
the EU’s justice commissioner, is slated to attend a previously scheduled meeting with Twitter executives in Ireland on Thursday. He plans to ask about the company’s ability to comply with the law and to meet its commitments on data protection and tackling online hate speech, according to an EU official familiar with the trip.
Věra Jourová, a vice president of the EU’s executive arm, said she was concerned about reports of the firing of vast amounts of Twitter staff in Europe. “European laws continue to apply to Twitter, regardless of who is the owner,” she said.
Mr. Musk has said that he would follow the laws of the countries where Twitter operates and that it “cannot become a free-for-all hellscape.”
Twitter didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Late Wednesday, Mr. Musk tweeted that the number of views of tweets he described as “hate speech” had fallen below levels seen before a spike in such views in late October.
“Congrats to the Twitter team!” Mr. Musk wrote.
Some of the people who either departed or declined to sign on to Twitter 2.0 appear to include Sinead McSweeney, the company’s Ireland-based vice president of global policy and philanthropy, who led government relations and compliance initiatives with regulations worldwide, as well as the two remaining staffers in Twitter’s Brussels office.
Ms. McSweeney and the two Brussels employees declined to comment, but emails to their work addresses started bouncing back undeliverable in recent days according to checks by The Wall Street Journal. Four other Brussels-based employees were earlier this month told they were being laid off, according to social-media posts and people familiar with the matter.
Twenty Air Street, London, the home of Twitter’s U.K. office.
Photo:
Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
Damien Viel, Twitter’s country manager for France, was also among a wave of staffers who posted publicly this week that they had left the company. He declined to comment when reached by the Journal.
At least some of the departures occurred in teams that reported to
Yoel Roth,
Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, who resigned earlier this month. In an op-ed for the New York Times, Mr. Roth said he resigned because Mr. Musk made it clear that he alone would make decisions on policy and the platform’s rules and that he had little use for those at the company who were advising him on those issues.
The team included Ilana Rosenzweig, who worked as Twitter’s senior director and head of international trust and safety. She has left the company, according to her LinkedIn profile. Based in Singapore, Ms. Rosenzweig led Twitter’s trust and safety teams across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, along with Japan and other Asia-Pacific countries, according to her profile.
“I decided not to agree to Twitter 2.0,” Keith Yet, a Twitter trust and safety worker based in Singapore, wrote on LinkedIn on Monday. Mr. Yet worked on child sexual exploitation issues and handling legal escalations from Japan and other countries, according to his LinkedIn profile. Attempts to reach Ms. Rosenzweig and Mr. Yet were unsuccessful.
The departures come amid a wave of new tech regulation, particularly in Europe. The Digital Services Act, which will by the middle of next year require tech companies like Twitter with more than 45 million users in the EU to maintain robust systems for removing content that European national governments deem to be illegal.
The act also requires these companies to reduce risks associated with content that regulators consider harmful or hateful. It mandates regular outside audits of the companies’ processes and threatens noncompliance fines of up to 6% of a company’s annual revenue.
Political leaders had warned that Mr. Musk’s Twitter would have to comply with EU rules. “In Europe, the bird will fly by our rules,” tweeted the EU’s commissioner for the internal market,
Thierry Breton,
hours after Mr. Musk completed his Twitter deal in late October tweeting, “the bird is free.”
A spokesman for the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, said this week that it had active contacts with the company regarding the regulation and tackling disinformation and illegal hate speech, but declined to comment on the substance of Twitter’s compliance plans.
Activists and researchers are also concerned that the departures could undermine Twitter’s ability to block state-backed information operations aimed at spreading propaganda and harassing adversaries. The wave of departures “raises questions about how Twitter will moderate tweets and comments in a professional and neutral manner,” said Patrick Poon, an activist turned scholar at Japan’s Meiji University, who analyzes free speech.
—Liza Lin, Alexa Corse and Sarah E. Needleman contributed to this article.
Write to Sam Schechner at Sam.Schechner@wsj.com, Kim Mackrael at kim.mackrael@wsj.com and Newley Purnell at newley.purnell@wsj.com
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Inside Twitter as ‘mass exodus’ of staffers throws platform’s future into uncertainty
New York
CNN Business
—
Death is in the air on Twitter.
On the platform Thursday evening, where #RIPTwitter was the top trend worldwide, users wrote what they feared might be their last posts, offering apprehensive goodbyes and listing the other (more stable) social media platforms where they can still be found.
They were reacting to the dire news emanating from inside Twitter. Scores of remaining employees at the social media company on Thursday appeared to reject owner Elon Musk’s ultimatum to work “extremely hardcore,” throwing the communications platform into utter disarray and raising serious questions about how much longer it will survive.
A version of this article first appeared in the “Reliable Sources” newsletter. Sign up for the daily digest chronicling the evolving media landscape here.
The death of Twitter would have weighty consequences, given how integral the platform is to global communications. The platform has often been compared to a digital town square. World leaders use Twitter to communicate, journalists use Twitter to newsgather, dissidents in repressive countries use Twitter to organize, celebrities and major brands use Twitter to make important announcements, and the public often uses Twitter to monitor all of it in real-time.
If the platform were to die off, or become unusable because of instability issues, no single space would immediately replace it and communications could become fractured across multiple social media websites, leading to a seismic disruption and slowdown in the flow of information.
Inside the company’s Slack, a mass resignation effectively occurred after Musk’s 5pm deadline for employees to arrive at a decision passed. Hundreds of staffers appear to have called it quits, accepting Musk’s offer to exit in exchange for three months of severance.
Employees flooded the “#social-watercooler” channel with the salute emoji, indicating that they had chosen not to sign Musk’s pledge. A similar series of events unfolded in the Slack channel earlier this month as Musk eliminated roughly 50% of the company’s then 7,500-person workforce.
A former Twitter executive, who recently exited the company, described the situation as a “mass exodus.” Asked about the situation, the former executive said, “Elon is finding out that he can’t bully top senior talent. They have lots of options and won’t put up with his antics.”
“They will struggle just to keep the lights on,” the former executive added.
That assessment was universally shared by the other half dozen current and former employees on Thursday. It was already bad enough after Musk executed mass layoffs at the company earlier this month. So bad that Twitter asked some of the people it had let go to come back just days later. The state-of-play has only become more dire since then.
In fact, Twitter management was in panic mode hours before the deadline passed, people familiar with the matter said, explaining that senior leaders were “scrambling” to convince talent to stay at the company.
Musk himself seemed to finally realize the grim state of affairs, sending an all-staff email relaxing his previously uncompromising anti-remote work position. “Regarding remote work, all that is required for approval is that your manager takes responsibility for ensuring that you are making an excellent contribution,” Musk said in the email.
It didn’t appear to do much good.
Two employees who had decided to reject Musk’s ultimatum on Thursday were quite clear in why they were doing so. “I don’t want to stick around to build a product that’s being poisoned from the inside and out,” one said, adding later that he felt good about making a decision “in line with what I stand for.”
A recently laid off employee who remains in touch with former coworkers said, “People don’t want to sacrifice their mental health and family lives to make the richest man in the world richer.”
And Twitter seemed to grasp the mess on its hands Thursday evening, sending an email to staff notifying them it has once again shuttered all of its offices and suspended employee badge access, presumably to protect its systems and data.
Twitter’s already decimated communications department didn’t respond to requests for comment. But Musk nodded to the situation in a tweet.
“How do you make a small fortune in social media?” Musk asked. “Start out with a large one.”
Twitter exodus: company faces murky future as top managers flee the nest | Twitter
Twitter is facing fresh uncertainty amid a growing exodus of top management and reports that mass layoffs and major changes to the platform could be coming within days.
The company’s advertising and marketing chiefs have recently announced their departures, as well as the chief people and diversity officer, the general manager for core technologies, the head of product and vice-president of global sales. Last week, Elon Musk fired the CEO, Parag Agrawal, the chief financial officer, Ned Segal, and the legal affairs and policy chief, Vijaya Gadde, shortly after taking over the company.
Sarah Personette, the chief customer officer and ad boss who had said she was looking forward to working with Musk, tweeted on Tuesday that she had resigned, adding to advertisers’ uncertainty over how the social media company will change under its new owner.
Dalana Brand, the chief people and diversity officer announced on Tuesday in a LinkedIn post that she had also resigned last week. The general manager for core technologies, Nick Caldwell, confirmed his departure on Twitter, changing his profile bio to “former Twitter exec” by Monday night.
Chief marketing officer Leslie Berland, Twitter’s head of product Jay Sullivan, and its vicepresident of global sales, Jean-Philippe Maheu, have also left, a person with knowledge of the matter told Reuters. It was not immediately clear whether they quit or were asked to leave.
Reports about job cuts have swirled since even before Musk officially took over. The latest report from Bloomberg said on Wednesday that Twitter’s new billionaire owner would cut about 3,700 jobs – amounting to half of Twitter’s workforce, in order to reduce costs, and would also ask workers to return to the office. The outlet further reported that Musk planned to start charging for Twitter “blue check mark” verification by next week.
Multiple employees told Reuters they continue to receive little communication about the future of the company. Twitter cancelled a check-in call last week as well as an all-staff meeting that was scheduled for Wednesday.
Meanwhile, Musk’s team plans to meet with advertisers in New York next week as the company’s increasingly skittish customers raise alarms about the potential for harmful content to appear next to their ads.
Hateful content has skyrocketed since Musk’s takeover. Use of the n-word has increased by nearly 500% on Twitter, according to the Network Contagion Research Institute, which identifies “cyber-social threats”.
A coalition of more than 40 advocacy organizations including the NAACP and Free Press sent an open letter to Twitter’s top 20 advertisers on Tuesday, asking them to pull their ads if Musk guts content moderation on the platform.
Mediabrands, a unit of ad holding company IPG, has advised its clients to pause advertising on Twitter for the next week until the company gives more details about its plans to protect trust and safety on the platform, Reuters reported, according to a source familiar with the matter. IPG works with major advertisers such as Coca-Cola.
Musk has attempted to reassure advertisers. “Twitter’s commitment to brand safety is unchanged,” he tweeted on Monday.
He previously said he would reverse Twitter’s ban on Donald Trump, who was kicked off because of concerns he could incite further violence after the insurrection at the US Capitol last year. But this week, Musk indicated that no banned accounts would be re-instated until at least after the US midterms.
Elon Musk’s Twitter Faces Exodus of Advertisers and Executives – The New York Times
- Elon Musk’s Twitter Faces Exodus of Advertisers and Executives The New York Times
- Twitter staff have been told to work 84-hour weeks and managers slept at the office over the weekend as they scramble to meet Elon Musk’s tight deadlines, reports say msnNOW
- Twitter On A Downsizing Rampage Since Musk Takeover; Terminates Key Ad And Marketing Officials Yahoo Finance
- Executive exodus guts Twitter’s top management Reuters
- One of Twitter’s top execs quit the day after tweeting that she had a ‘great discussion’ with Elon Musk about the company’s future msnNOW
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Explainer: Why Venezuela’s refugee exodus to the U.S. has been accelerating
Oct 18 (Reuters) – U.S. and Mexican authorities recently announced a new policy that would expel Venezuelans entering the U.S. land border back to Mexico, but allow up to 24,000 people from the country to apply for humanitarian entry into the United States by air.
As a result of the new policy, thousands of Venezuelans believed to be en route to the United States are now stranded between the two countries during a year when Venezuelans are arriving at the U.S. border in record numbers.
WHY WERE THE NEW MEASURES PUT IN PLACE?
The measures respond in part to political pressure on U.S. President Joe Biden to curb record numbers of illegal crossings at the Mexico-U.S. border. Venezuelans have been one of the largest groups of migrants involved in such crossings, in part because Washington granted temporary protection status last year to those who were on U.S. soil. Deporting Venezuelans is also more complicated than with migrants of other nationalities because the two countries broke diplomatic relations in 2019, making it difficult to organize deportation flights.
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More than 150,000 Venezuelans were apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border between October 2021 and August 2022, compared with nearly 48,000 in fiscal-year 2021, according to U.S. government data. In September, over 33,000 Venezuelan individuals were encountered at the U.S.-Mexico border – more than the number of unique crossers from Mexico and more than immigrants from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras combined, according to U.S. government data.
WHAT HAPPENS NOW TO VENEZUELANS IN TRANSIT TO THE UNITED STATES?
Those in transit may attempt to reach the United States despite the near certainty that they will be sent back to Mexico. Mexican authorities so far have given many of these individuals a deadline of no more than two weeks to leave the country. It is unclear where Venezuelans waiting in Mexico will stay, as Mexico’s migrant shelter system is often overwhelmed.
Some may return to Venezuela, while others could settle down in different Latin American countries, where Venezuelan migrants have in some cases faced discrimination, limited job opportunities and restrictions on their migratory status.
Half of the Venezuelan refugee and migrant population across Latin America and the Caribbean cannot afford three meals a day and lacks access to housing, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), forcing many to resort to sex work or begging.
WHO CAN APPLY FOR THE NEW U.S. PROGRAM?
Venezuelans who meet the U.S. requirements may apply for the recently announced U.S. program. Among the requirements is having a U.S.-based supporter and holding a valid passport. The cost of a passport in Venezuela is $200, nearly ten times the country’s minimum wage.
Maria Victoria, 8, cries because she wants to see her father who is in the United States, during a protest on the banks of the Rio Bravo river, after Venezuelan migrants were expelled from the U.S. with their families and sent back to Mexico under Title 42, in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico October 18, 2022. REUTERS/Jose Luis Gonzalez
Only 1% of 1,591 migrants who left Venezuela between June and August held a passport, according to the Observatory of Social Investigations, a rights group.
WHAT TRIGGERED THE VENEZUELAN EXODUS?
Under late President Hugo Chavez, who died in 2013, the country with the world’s largest oil reserves weathered corruption and inflation.
Then in 2014, Venezuela’s economy buckled as global oil prices tumbled, and living conditions further deteriorated as stringent price controls created widespread shortages. Products began to disappear from store shelves while black markets thrived with goods ranging from cooking oil to corn flour.
In 2018, inflation in Venezuela exceeded 1 million percent. Medicines for conditions from headaches to cancer were unavailable.
WHY ARE VENEZUELANS STILL MIGRATING?
Despite some improvements following a 2019 opening of the economy that included an informal dollarization, most Venezuelans still struggle to afford basic goods and services. Efforts by the government of Chavez’s successor, Nicolas Maduro, to ease economic restrictions have alleviated shortages and fueled consumption in high-income brackets, but left the vast majority of the population making wages that fall well short of the cost of living.
The monthly minimum wage in the OPEC-member nation is around $15 while the price of a basket of goods covering the monthly needs of a family of five was around $370 at the end of September, according to the nongovernmental Venezuelan Finance Observatory.
Even in the commerce and services sector of relatively wealthy Caracas, employees make an average of only around $130 a month. Meanwhile in the public sector, which employs some 2.2 million, the average monthly salary is about $20 to $30.
Economists say at least 30% of the population has not benefited from the new economic measures.
Remittances to Venezuelans from relatives in the United States or elsewhere help but are insufficient for most. Just one-fourth of Venezuelan families receive remittances, averaging only $70 a month, according to Caracas-based consultancy Anova.
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Reporting by Vivian Sequera in Caracas and Sarah Kinosian in Mexico City
Editing by Matthew Lewis
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Tyson foods latest large business to flee Chicago, what sparked the exodus?
Chicago business owner Uzma Sharif lays out her plan to relocate her business out of the city and discusses the reasoning behind her decision to move on ‘Cavuto: Coast to Coast.’
Tyson Foods Inc. became the latest large company to announce its departure from Chicago, continuing a trend in the city that many have argued is the result of the city’s skyrocketing rates of crime and threatens to do harm to its most vulnerable populations.
“You’re talking about a situation where you have a hollowed out economy, where you have businesses leaving, there are no jobs,” Heritage Foundation senior research fellow in the Center for Health and Welfare Policy Robert Moffit told Fox News Digital last month. “And the people who are desperately hurt by this are mostly low income and black and minority residents who suffer the most from this high crime.”
Moffit’s comments came after McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski took aim at Chicago in a mid-September speech, arguing that the city’s rising crime rates have made it increasingly difficult for companies to operate or find employees.
“We have violent crime that’s happening in our restaurants … we’re seeing homelessness issues in our restaurants. We’re having drug overdoses that are happening in our restaurants,”” Kempczinski said at the time. “So we see in our restaurants, every single day, what’s happening in society at large.”
CHICAGO FACES MORE CORPORATE DEPARTURES AS TYSON FOODS MOVES TO ARKANSAS
Chicago’s Mayor Lori Lightfoot. (REUTERS/Kamil Krzaczynski – / Reuters)
Crime in Chicago has spiked during Black Lives Matter riots and the defund the police movement in the aftermath of the 2020 death of George Floyd, with the city recording its deadliest year in a quarter-century in 2021 with 797 homicides.
Chicago Police Department Chief of Detectives Eugene Roy told Fox News Digital over the summer that the city has engaged in a “stealth defunding” of the police department by failing to provide adequate resources and staffing to the department as officers leave or retire.
The reality has seen crime rise across nearly every category, something businesses are taking note of as they look toward the future.
Billionaire Ken Griffin announced earlier this year that he was moving his hedge-fund firm, Citadel, out of Chicago because of the rising crime, a move that was also made by mining equipment giant Caterpillar and Boeing, the world’s largest aerospace company.
SKYROCKETING CHICAGO CRIME HAS SMALL BUSINESSES, CORPORATIONS PACK THEIR BAGS: ‘ENOUGH IS ENOUGH’
yson Foods Inc., sign at Tyson headquarters in Springdale, Ark. (AP Photo/April L. Brown, File) / AP Newsroom)
“If people aren’t safe here, they’re not going to live here,” Griffin told the Wall Street Journal in April. “I’ve had multiple colleagues mugged at gunpoint. I’ve had a colleague stabbed on the way to work. Countless issues of burglary. I mean, that’s a really difficult backdrop with which to draw talent to your city from.”
Chicago has also seen small businesses flee the area, with Gary Rabine, founder of the Rabine Group and owner of 13 businesses, telling Fox News Digital last month that crime was behind his decision to take his rod paving business elsewhere.
“We would do thousands of jobs a year in the city, but as we got robbed more, my people operating rollers and pavers we got robbed, our equipment would get stolen in broad daylight and there would usually be a gun involved, and it got expensive and it got dangerous,” Rabine said.
Rabine also pointed out that the rising crime leads to increased costs in other areas, pointing to increased expenses in both security for his businesses and insurance rates.
CHICAGO MAYOR LIGHTFOOT TELLS MCDONALD’S CEO TO ‘EDUCATE HIMSELF’ AFTER HE WARNS OF RISING CRIME
“What happened eventually is we said enough is enough,” Rabine said. “We stopped doing work down there, we stopped doing work for the gas company, the electric company, the south side, the west side and eventually all over Chicago. Those companies now work in other places. They work over the border in Wisconsin, the outer suburbs of Chicago, where they feel safer.”
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has defended the city in the wake of the exodus, arguing business leaders such as Kempczinski don’t have a firm understanding of the situation.
“I think what would have been helpful is for the McDonald’s CEO to educate himself before he spoke,” the Chicago Democrat told reporters last month, pointing to a letter from World Business Chicago President Michael Fassnacht that she argued “lays out in exact detail all the good news, economic news, about what’s happening in our city.”
But Kempczinksi wasn’t buying the rosy picture painted by city officials.
CHICAGO SMALL BUSINESSES SUFFER FROM CRIME PLAGUE WITH NO ‘EFFORT’ FROM CITY TO STOP IT
“The fact is that there are fewer large companies headquartered in Chicago this year than last year,” Kempczinski said. “There are fewer this month than last month.”
(L) McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski (R) Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot (Getty Images / Getty Images)
Tyson becomes the latest company to contribute to the trend, though its leaders stayed away from publicly pointing to rising crime as a driver of the decision.
Bringing our talented corporate team members and businesses together under one roof unlocks greater opportunities to share perspectives and ideas, while also enabling us to act quickly to solve problems and provide the innovative products and solutions that our customers deserve and value,” Tyson CEO Donnie King said in a release announcing the decision, pointing out that the employees would be moving to the company’s global headquarters in Arkansas.
Nevertheless, Rabine argued the city will continue to lose businesses as they have a difficult time attracting talent to a city plagued by violence.
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“If you want a great culture in your company you have to have people that love being on the team and they don’t want to live in a violent area,” Rabine said. “They don’t want to live in a place where their kids can’t walk to school safely and their wives and kids can’t go shopping in a beautiful environment like Michigan Avenue which was once the safest place you could ever go shopping.”
Lightfoot’s office did not immediately respond to a Fox Business request for comment.
Rumor Roundup: AEW talent exodus, Buddy Matthews’ future, McIntyre & Kross, more!
Speculating on the rumors surrounding pro wrestling is a favored pastime of many fans, perhaps second only to actually watching the matches. In this daily column, we take a look at the latest rumors being churned out by the pro wrestling rumor mill.
Important reminder: Rumors are just that — rumors. None of this has been confirmed as fact, it’s just circulating around the pro wrestling rumor mill. We track rumor accuracy in a weekly feature called Rumor Look Back you can find here. Remember, take it all with a grain of salt.
Rumors for the Day:
- Dave Meltzer responded to someone asking if we should expect an exodus of AEW talent, particularly from NXT, and said “looks like a few right now.” He clarified that he doesn’t think it will be a mass exodus but “looks like a few want to go.”
- Fightful Select has sources telling them there is a belief Buddy Matthews could be on his way out of AEW, and this past week’s Rampage taping may have been his last night in the company.
- In addition to Drew McIntyre dealing with food poisoning, Fightful says his segment with Karrion Kross on SmackDown went wrong when the flash paper didn’t work as intended and they were forced to change things on the fly. They say everything after that was improvised.
- The Wrestling Observer Newsletter says that WWE has been talking about promoting Gigi Dolin & Jacy Jayne to the main roster for a while.
- This week’s Newsletter also includes a note about an injury to Aliyah. She’s been out hurt, but it’s believed to be minor. She’s listed to return next week.
If you have heard of any interesting rumors that you’d like to add, feel free to post them in the comments section below. Just remember they are rumors and not confirmed as fact, so please take them as such. And check our weekly Rumor Look Back here to keep track of how often rumors turn out to be correct.
Staff exodus risks safety at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant
She had kept working at the Zaporizhzhia complex for months after it was stormed by the Russians in March, among hundreds of Ukrainian workers effectively kept hostage to enable the power station – the largest nuclear power plant in Europe — to keep running.
But eventually, the constant explosions and fears for her young son’s life made her take the risk to leave.
“It’s scary,” Elena told CNN. “Everything explodes there.”
CNN agreed to use only Elena’s first name out of respect for her safety concerns.
The Ukrainians have accused the Russian troops of using the plant as a shield, and risking serious damage or a potential disaster at the plant. In response, the Kremlin has repeatedly claimed Ukrainian forces are shelling the plant.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said during an address to the UN Security Council on Wednesday that Russia had “put the world on the brink of radiation catastrophe” by turning the plant into a “war zone,” and called for demilitarization of the plant.
“At night (the Russians) are firing somewhere behind the reservoir,” Elena said. “There are many, many explosions at the same time, like big cars firing.”
Fears about the consequences of the actions of Russian troops around the plant have hastened an exodus of workers.
“For the last two weeks, there has been a crazy outflow of staff,” said Daria, an employee who is still working at the nuclear plant. CNN agreed not to use her real name in light of her safety concerns. “We have people leaving en masse, dozens of them, in packs.”
Elena said employees at the plant are terrified of the Russian troops based there, as they walk around with machine guns and, at night, often “get drunk and shoot in the air.”
“A man was killed there just before I left. That’s why we left,” Elena said.
Three Ukrainian plant workers have been killed by the Russian military since March by beating or being shelled, and at least 26 others have been detained on accusations of leaking information, Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights Dmytro Lubinets said on Wednesday.
‘Very dangerous’ conditions
For those who remain at the plant, the situation is “getting worse with each day,” Petro Kotin, the president of the Ukrainian state-run nuclear power operator Energoatom, told CNN.
“It is a very difficult situation,” Kotin said. “They are heroes actually, continuing working in these conditions in the plant.”
Kotin said Russian forces had placed 20 trucks in two turbine halls, as revealed in a recent leaked video that was verified by CNN.
“We believe there (are) explosive materials inside these trucks,” Kotin said. “And that is very dangerous.”
A potential fire could spread to the nearby reactor, because the entrance for the fire brigade is blocked, he said.
He believes that the Russians will attempt to switch the output of the Zaporizhzhia plant from the Ukrainian power grid to the Russian network, a process that would involve a “full shutdown” of the plant using diesel generators to cool the reactors. Such an operation would be highly dangerous, he said.
On Thursday, the plant was completely disconnected from Ukraine’s power grid for the first time in its history, according to the country’s nuclear operator, Energoatom. It said fires at nearby ash pits had caused the last remaining power line connecting to Ukraine’s energy grid to disconnect twice, adding that the “actions of the invaders” were to blame.
The Russian-installed regional governor later said work was underway to restore the power supply to the region. He in turn blamed Ukrainian military action for the outages.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said late on Thursday that all six reactors remained disconnected from Ukraine’s power grid.
‘Powerless anger’
The growing dangers of working at the plant have added to the psychological pressure on the skeleton staffing left behind. Plant employee Daria said only 10-15% of staff now remain in her department, who live day-to-day in a “state of powerless anger.”
“Mentally it’s already very hard,” Daria said. “But I don’t know when and how we will leave.”
Daria said the technical staff at the plant are “doing the impossible” to keep it running without incident, but she added that the world “has no idea how serious everything is, how much everything hangs on a thin thread.”
“The human psychological state can lead to accidents,” Daria said. “At plants like ours, it’s not really the equipment that is to blame. What matters here are people, their decisions, their reactions to signals, to any violations, to any damage.”
The IAEA is currently negotiating with Russia for an urgent inspection of the nuclear plant to assess the safety of the operation. But Daria said she thinks “nothing will change” even if this happens.
“My only hope is the Ukrainian army,” Daria said, but she fears what the Russians will do if they arrive. “They are so fond of saying ‘we will destroy you,’ and they already have their orders for that. That’s why people leave.”