Twitter is struggling to respond to political misinformation and other harmful posts on the social media platform after Elon Musk laid off roughly half of its workforce just days before the US midterm elections, according to employees who survived the cuts and an outside voting rights group. The recent mass layoffs have spared many people whose job it is to keep hate and misinformation off the social media platform. Musk has laid off only 15% of those front-line content moderation workers, compared with about 50% job cuts across the company, the executive said last week.
But in preparation for the layoffs, employees said the company also significantly limited the number of employees who can view a specific account’s digital history and behavior — a practice necessary to investigate and take action against malicious use. to suspend it. The company said it froze access to these tools during the transition to reduce “insider risk.” The development is cause for concern as the US election culminates on Tuesday. Although millions of Americans have already voted early and absentee, millions more are expected to go to the polls to cast in-person ballots.
Election observers worry that the platform may not be equipped to handle hate speech, misinformation that could affect voter safety and security, and actors seeking to challenge the legitimate winners of elections across the country. Six months ago, disinformation researchers alerted Twitter on Friday to three posts from well-known far-right figures refuting claims of election fraud. Posts remain three days late. When Common Cause asked Twitter for an update on Monday, the platform said the posts were “under review.”
Before Musk took over, Twitter was much more responsive, said Jesse Littlewood, vice president of campaigns at Common Cause. The group said it was in regular contact with Twitter employees before Musk took over. They now receive a reply from a generic email address. “We were getting a much faster decision from them, sometimes within hours,” Littlewood said. Now, he said, “It’s like pressing the walk signal button at a traffic light and nothing happens.”
Musk gutted the teams working on marketing, communications and editorial management of what people see on Twitter. But his decision to retain most of Twitter’s content moderation team came as a welcome surprise to some inside and outside the company. After all, Musk has promised to let free speech flourish by loosening Twitter’s content restrictions and reinstating accounts banned for violating those rules. It also pledged to end the current user authentication system in favor of a $7.99 subscription.
But the fact that the content moderation team has survived could mean that critical disinformation functions, such as blocking incitement to political violence, will continue and some of the worst-case scenarios for election disinformation will not materialize. Some of Musk’s own tweets have been commented on with fact-checked connections in recent days.
Two employees who survived the job credit previously little-known executive Yoel Roth, Twitter’s global head of security and integrity, for leveraging his team’s importance to Musk’s goals for Twitter while avoiding moves that might anger the mercurial CEO Tesla. “Yoel Roth single-handedly saved the company,” said a Twitter employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of job security concerns. “On the public side, he appropriately and thoughtfully engaged with Elon Musk in a way that was not condescending, but deferring, because Elon is king.”
Roth has become the public face of Twitter’s content moderation since Musk took over and regularly advocates for Twitter’s ongoing efforts to combat harmful misinformation. Musk, a prolific tweeter with more than 110 million followers, has often pointed to Roth’s Twitter feed as the most reliable report on the company’s adherence to integrity standards. And the billionaire, who espouses the idea that Twitter’s past leadership stifled right-wing views, defended Roth as ardent Musk supporters called for his firing over past comments they believed showed Roth’s liberal bias.
Roth, who once worked at an Apple store repairing Mac computers, joined Twitter in 2015 after spending a year studying online hate speech at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, according to his LinkedIn profile. In May, he took on a leadership role “responsible for all user, content and security policies, involving more than 120 policymakers, threat investigators, data analysts and operations specialists.”
Roth did not respond to requests for comment. The legal scholar, who sits on Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council, which was founded in 2016, said she has long been impressed by Roth’s candor about the challenges of content moderation and the nuances of free speech — such as the importance of curbing offensive content. to allow freedom of expression for women and others who may be harassed online.
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