The furloughs included a number of people who were scheduled to be on standby this weekend and early next week to monitor for signs of foreign disinformation, spam and other problematic content about the election, a former employee told The Washington Post. As of Friday morning, employee access to internal tools used to moderate content continued to be restricted, limiting staff’s ability to respond to misinformation.
Twitter had become one of America’s most influential platforms for disseminating accurate voting information, and the days leading up to the election were often critical moments where company and campaign officials engaged in a near-constant dialogue about potential risks.
But a representative from one of the party’s national committees said they are seeing delays of hours in responses from their Twitter contacts, raising fears of workplace chaos and sudden disruptions taking the platform’s ability to react quickly to developments. The representative spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.
Some researchers who track online threats said they also feared the cuts would cut lines of communication between the company and police that have been used to identify people threatening voter intimidation or offline violence.
“Law enforcement can lose precious minutes in identifying that person who we think poses an actual threat,” said Katherine Keneally, a senior research manager at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an institute that studies political extremism and polarization.
Keneally said she had already seen an increase in threatening content related to the election. She pointed to a post where a user wrote about the need to “pour bleach or gasoline” on ballot boxes, a target of right-wing conspiracy theories about systematic voter fraud.
Communications officials at Twitter did not respond to requests for comment. Many of them were among those laid off.
Yoel Roth, the company’s head of security and integrity and one of the few senior executives to survive Musk’s takeover, tweeted Friday evening that the company’s “core moderation capabilities remain in place.” He said the cuts in Twitter’s Trust & Safety division were about 15 percent, in contrast to about 50 percent of cuts across the company.
“With early voting underway in the US, our election integrity efforts — including harmful disinformation that can suppress voting and combating state-sponsored information operations — remain a top priority,” he tweeted.
Musk, the world’s richest man who spent $44 billion on the site, has said the company’s massive layoffs of 7,500 staff will help prepare it for future success, and he has instructed workers to roll out services he says it will protect the platform as a digital town square.
Some of his more aggressive changes, however, are also sparking concern. Under Musk’s leadership, the company is pushing a service — scheduled to be unveiled Monday, the day before the election — that would give any paying user the “verified” badge icon now offered only to politicians, journalists and figures. other notables who have confirmed their identity. The move, some political officials said, could fuel deep confusion in the final hours of the race.
“Imitation of choice [officials] is a serious concern for us as the platform considers modifications to their verifications,” said Amy Cohen, executive director of the National Association of State Election Directors. “We hope Twitter’s leadership makes any changes ahead of the election carefully and recognizing the critical role the platform plays in the election information ecosystem.”
Among Twitter’s cuts was its curation team, a key part of the company’s efforts to guide users to reliable news sources and reduce viral hoaxes and conspiracy theories. The team has worked for years to counter election-related lies, such as claims that mail-in ballots would be discarded, and to provide reliable information in cases where losing candidates have falsely claimed victory.
In October 2020, ahead of the US presidential election, the team added context for all the trends found in Twitter’s prime real estate — its About You and What’s Happening boxes — to its app and website. internet. As recently as two weeks ago, Twitter was touting the team’s undoing efforts as a key aspect of it. approaching the mid-term of 2022.
But on Friday, multiple Twitter employees told The Washington Post that the entire team appeared to have been cut amid Musk’s layoffs. Edward Perez, a former director of product at Twitter and an expert on election integrity, said: “For Musk to back down from Twitter’s positive efforts to preempt or refute false claims, just days before a major election, it’s just a terrible time.”
The cuts have also shocked members of civil rights and advocacy groups who met with Musk earlier this week to share their concerns about the hiring. Musk had “promised to maintain and enforce the election integrity measures that were on Twitter’s books before he took over,” Jessica González, a co-director of the Free Press group, said Friday. “With today’s mass layoffs, it’s clear that Musk’s actions betray his words. … Even before Musk took over, this operation was dangerously under-resourced.”
Rashad Robinson, the president of the civil rights group Color of Change, took issue with Musk’s proposal to change Twitter’s “verified” system right before the midterms, saying it “could have [an] unprecedented impact on election chaos.”
“Any right-wing troll can pay $8 on Monday, get a blue tick, and then change their username to ‘CNN’ or ‘Georgia Secretary of State’ and show up as verified and call the races , he said.
Even before the layoffs, experts had warned that Twitter didn’t have enough people on staff to handle content moderation. An audit that whistleblower Peiter Zatko commissioned from Alethea Group found that Twitter’s integrity teams were “consistently inadequate” and “needed to make significant trade-offs.”
During the US election, Twitter has created an election team that includes people from outside the main content moderation units to help identify threats; the company’s ability to staff that unit will probably be affected by the cuts.
Researchers who study election disinformation said there is also uncertainty about what the Twitter layoffs will mean as voters across the country head to the polls.
Kate Starbird, an associate professor at the University of Washington, said during a virtual conference Friday that Twitter has been “massively disrupted” and that she is “waiting to see how the dynamic changes without even knowing what changes have happened under the hood.” .
“Some of the way that platform worked yesterday is not going to be the way it works today, tomorrow and going into the election on Tuesday,” she said.
Joan Donovan, research director at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy, said she had also seen reports of increased coordinated activity, hateful content and harassing messages. But she said she was encouraged by Musk’s decision not to allow banned users to immediately return to the platform, which, she predicted, would avoid “the avalanche of misinformation that many people are expecting.”
On alternative platforms, meanwhile, there was rejoicing at the possibility of less moderation of content on Twitter. One user with more than 72,000 followers on the Telegram chat app celebrated that the anticipated changes were happening “AHEAD OF THE US ELECTION” so “whatever happens on Tuesday … a lot more people will be talking about it on Twitter”.
For Donovan, this expectation can actually blunt the impact of misinformation. “Because Twitter’s chaotic changes have become public, many people will already be skeptical of the information they’re getting from the platform,” she said. “Not considered a very reliable source at this time.”
Several employees in roles related to the midterms announced on Twitter that they had been terminated. Michele Austin, the company’s director of US and Canadian public policy, wrote that she helped lead the 2022 midterm elections on the platform and was “in denial” that her time at the company was over.
Kevin Sullivan, a civic integrity specialist who said on LinkedIn that he led editorial planning for the 2022 midterm elections and election disinformation, also announced his departure.
“He couldn’t wait until Wednesday? #Elections2022“, he wrote on Twitter.
Matt Brown, Naomi Nix, Will Oremus, Brittany Shammas and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez contributed to this report.
