Elon Musk has fired 80% of its security engineers after buying Twitter and rebranding it X, while the company also laid off a third of its non-engineering security team, according to a report published yesterday by eSafety, the security regulator in internet australia.

The information comes after the commissioner used Australia’s Internet Safety Act to demand answers from X about how it keeps users safe. Elon Musk’s company said it had 279 security-focused engineers worldwide before the takeover in October 2022. That number has dropped to 55 by the end of May 2023.

Their trust and security team, which numbered 4,062 people, was reduced to 2,849, while the content moderation team was cut in half, from 107 to 51, although most of X’s moderators were outsourced. The company had 2,613 engaged moderators in October 2022, and that number dropped to 2,305 by May 2023.

Those cuts have had an impact, eSafety believes, and claims users have reported that response times to offensive tweets have slowed by 20 percent since Musk bought the social network. The company’s efforts to deal with abusive direct messages have slowed by 70 percent, according to an Australian government agency.

X informed the Commissioner that following the dissolution of its Trust and Safety Council, which provided external advice to the company, it had not sought to form a body to replace it. X also confirmed to the agency that it did not have an employee dealing exclusively with worldwide misconduct issues, either before or after Musk took over.

X did not respond to questions from Forbes about the government report.Forbes previously reported that Twitter’s security team had been drastically scaled back after the takeover and that the social network continued to have problems with child abuse, despite the owner’s previous promises to crack down on illegal content. However, this is the first time the data shows the extent of the cuts.

Shortly thereafter, in December, eSafety announced it was taking civil action against X for failing to provide information in response to a request for details of how the company combats online child abuse.

X had previously refused to pay a fine of A$610,500 ($409,000) for withholding information.Otherwise, the court could impose a maximum fine of A$782,000 ($524,456) per day from the time X breached the law until March 2023, potentially bringing the fine to hundreds of millions of dollars.

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