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Twitter’s devastating staff cuts on Friday, four days before the midterm elections, are fueling angst among political campaigns and election offices that have counted on the social network’s staff to help combat violent threats and viral lies.
Friday’s mass layoffs eliminated teams dedicated to combating election disinformation, adding context to misleading tweets and communicating with reporters, public officials and campaign staff.
The layoffs included a number of people who were scheduled to be on call this weekend and early next week to monitor for signs of foreign disinformation, spam and other problematic content surrounding the election, a former employee told The Washington Post. As of Friday morning, employee access to internal tools used for content moderation 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 have often been critical moments where company and campaign officials engaged in almost constant about the possible risks.
But a representative of one of the party’s national committees said they are seeing hours-long delays in responses from their contacts on Twitter, raising fears about labor chaos and sudden terminations taking a toll on the platform. 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 disrupt 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 trying to identify that person we think poses a real threat,” said Katherine Keneally, senior director of research at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a group of reflection that studies political extremism and polarization.
Keneally said he had already seen an increase in threatening content related to the election. He 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.
Twitter communications officials did not respond to requests for comment. Many of them were among the layoffs.
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 at Twitter’s trust and security division were 15 percent, in contrast to nearly 50 percent cuts across the company.
“With early voting underway across the United States, our efforts for election integrity, including harmful disinformation that can suppress the vote and combating state-backed information operations, remain a top priority.” , he tweeted.
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Musk, the world’s richest person who spent $44 billion on the site, has said massive cuts to the company’s 7,500-person staff will help set it up for future success, and has instructed to workers implementing services that he says will protect the platform as a digital city square.
Some of its more aggressive changes, however, are also causing discomfort. Under Musk, the company is moving forward with a service, to be unveiled Monday, a day before the election, that would give any paying user the “verified” verification mark icon now offered only to politicians, journalists and other notable characters who have confirmed their identity. That move, some political officials said, could fuel deep confusion in the final hours of the race.
“Impersonation of choice [officials] is a big concern for us as the platform considers modifications to its verifications,” said Amy Cohen, executive director of the National Association of State Election Directors. “We expect Twitter’s leadership to implement any changes sooner rather than later. of elections carefully and recognizing the critical role the platform plays in the election information ecosystem.”
Among the cuts at Twitter 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 falsehoods, such as claims that mail-in ballots would be discarded, and provide credible information in cases where losing candidates have falsely claimed victory.
In October 2020, ahead of the US presidential election, the team added context to all the trends that could be found in Twitter’s prime real estate: its “For You” and “What’s Happening” boxes ” on their app and website. Just two weeks ago, Twitter touted the team’s debunking efforts as a key aspect of its approach to the 2022 midterms.
But on Friday, several Twitter employees told the Washington Post that the entire team appeared to have been cut amid Musk’s layoffs. Edward Perez, a former Twitter product director and election integrity expert, said: “For Musk to withdraw from Twitter’s positive efforts to debunk or debunk false claims, just days before an important election, is simply a terrible time.”
Twitter will charge $8 per month for verification. What you need to know.
The cuts have also rattled members of advocacy and civil rights groups who met with Musk earlier this week to share their concerns about his inauguration. Musk had “promised to maintain and enforce the election integrity measures that were on Twitter’s books before he took office,” Jessica Gonzalez, co-leader of the Free Press group, said Friday. “With today’s massive 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, criticized Musk’s proposal to change Twitter’s “vetted” system just before the midterms, saying it “could have [an] unprecedented impact on the electoral chaos”.
“Any troll on the right can pay $8 on Monday, get a blue verification mark, then change their username to ‘CNN’ or ‘Georgia Secretary of State’ and appear verified and call races,” he said.
Musk’s meeting with civil rights groups upsets his supporters
Even before the layoffs, experts had warned that Twitter didn’t have enough people on staff to handle content moderation. An audit commissioned by whistleblower Peiter Zatko of the firm Alethea Group found that Twitter’s integrity teams were “persistently understaffed” and “had to make significant trade-offs”.
During the US election, Twitter has created an election team that includes people outside of the core content moderation units to help identify threats; the company’s ability to staff this unit will likely be affected by the cuts.
Researchers who study election disinformation said there’s also uncertainty about what Twitter layoffs would mean as voters across the country head to the polls.
Twitter cannot afford to be one of the most influential websites in the world
Kate Starbird, an associate professor at the University of Washington, said Friday during a virtual conference that Twitter has been “massively disrupted” and that she is “waiting to see how the dynamics change without even knowing what changes have happened under the hood “.
“Some of the ways this platform worked yesterday will not be the way it works today, tomorrow and Tuesday in the election,” he said.
Joan Donovan, director of research at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on 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 anticipating.”
On alternative platforms, meanwhile, there was joy at the prospect of less content moderation on Twitter. One user with more than 72,000 followers on the Telegram chat app celebrated that the planned changes are happening “JUST BEFORE THE US ELECTIONS” so that “whatever happens on Tuesday… a lot more people in will speak on Twitter.”
For Donovan, this expectation could reduce the impact of misinformation. “Since the chaotic changes on Twitter have taken place in the public eye, many people will already be skeptical of the information they receive from the platform,” he said. “It is not considered a very reliable source at this time.”
Some employees with roles related to the semesters announced on Twitter that they had been laid off. Michele Austin, the company’s director of public policy for the US and Canada, wrote that she helped lead the platform’s 2022 midterms 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 midterms and election disinformation, also announced his departure.
“Couldn’t have waited until Wednesday? #Election2022,” he tweeted.
Matt Brown, Naomi Nix, Will Oremus, Brittany Shammas and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez contributed to this report.