The groups said on Friday they are escalating their pressure and demanding brands pull their Twitter ads globally.
Staff who worked in engineering, communications, product, content curation and machine learning ethics were among those impacted by the layoffs, according to tweets from Twitter staff.
Shannon Raj Singh, an attorney who was Twitter's acting head of human rights, tweeted on Friday that the entire human rights team at the company had been cut.
Musk tweeted that his team had made no changes to content moderation and done "everything we could" to appease the groups.
Employees of Twitter Blue, the premium subscription service that Musk is bolstering, were also let go.