The first major voting cycle since the violence on January 6 adds to the uncertainty. The new owner slashed the company in half and sent some teams tasked with handling elections and misinformation packing.
Due to its superiority as a breaking news source and the fact that most elected leaders spend time there, it plays an outsized role in politics. With Musk in charge and half the company gone, some people who weren't supposed to be eliminated are about to be put to the test.
Musk threw his weight behind the Republicans one day before the election. Musk recommended voting for a Republican Congress because the Presidency is Democratic. Musk isn't the first tech CEO to hold political beliefs, but his last-minute advocacy shows that he isn't interested in being "politically neutral"
For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 27, 2022
The last-minute political endorsement Musk gave undermines trust in his ability to run the platform. The political message isn't surprising given recent spats with high-profile Democrats, but it's still alarming that these are the issues the new owner is spending his time with. Since buying the company, Musk has clashed with both Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Hillary Clinton, and the latter interaction offered a particularly alarming glimpse at just how little Musk understands or cares about trustworthiness.
With a week until Election Day, Musk showed his seriousness on the subject by replying to Clinton with an easily debunked conspiracy theory from a known misinformation source. At least one of the sycophants in Musk's inner circle must have flagged the reply as a risk to advertisers because Musk has since deleted it. The new owner quickly moved on to other topics without taking any accountability. It's not good.
There are many things that can go wrong when it comes to election misinformation. It's not just about the big calls, but also the thousands of little calls from state and local election administrators. Two years after the January 6 insurrection, election deniers in states like Arizona continue to spread false narratives about past election results while attempting to seize oversight for local elections for themselves. Will the staff or the political will be able to fact-check conspiracy theories? As more votes are counted, we will likely see a wave of claims about voting irregularity, mail-in ballots and political fates that change over time.
Musk is sending the platform into a critical situation with a skeleton crew. Half of the company's workforce walked out the door as a result of the company's rapid layoffs.
More than one team that touched election integrity was cut by the company despite reassurances from the head of Safety and Integrity. That includes the curation team, which provided context, monitored for misinformation and was used during elections. The curation team topped different parts of the platform with fact checked updates that filled information voids and served as counterprogramming for misinformation, which spreads quickly in fast moving news environments.
With early voting underway in the US, our efforts on election integrity are still a top priority.
Here are the facts about where Twitter’s Trust & Safety and moderation capacity stands today:
tl;dr: While we said goodbye to incredibly talented friends and colleagues yesterday, our core moderation capabilities remain in place.
— Yoel Roth (@yoyoel) November 4, 2022
A former director of public policy and elections was cut from the public policy team. The engineering team focused on user health was reduced due to the layoffs.
The platform barely dodged the chaos that a flood of newly verified accounts would have caused if Musk's pay-for-play verification plan was allowed to go forward.
Putin's allies in Russia are trying to undermine the U.S. elections by spreading false information. Russian businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin bragged that he had interfered in the U.S. politics and that he would do it again. Nathaniel Gleicher made some good points about that.
3/ Threat actors try perception hacking to trick the public & the media into doing the deception for them. Don’t fall for it. That includes not amplifying those claims — and asking for evidence to back them up.
— Nathaniel Gleicher (@ngleicher) November 7, 2022
The threat to U.S. elections this year is coming from within. The effort to undermine the election has been going on for months with false claims of ballot "trafficking" and threats of violence against election officials.
There are other social networks dealing with election misinformation. TikTok approved 90 percent of the test ads that contained false voting-related claims, including the wrong election date. Facebook detected some ads and failed to flag others, while YouTube detected all of the English-language ads and banned the channel publishing them.
Most political misinformation is not advertising. Most of the political claims and conspiracy theories are just part of the normal user-generated content that companies sift through. The majority of it is never reviewed.
Bad actors who want to manipulate the American electorate know that they can't do it without the help of social media. We are going to see a lot of stuff that pushes the boundaries of what is allowed. Musk has already shown that he is willing to change the rules on the fly, doling out his most severe punishment to comedians who impersonate him, not to serial harassers or accounts spreading hate speech.
Nothing we have seen so far has inspired confidence that the new owner of the micro-messaging service will rise to the challenge.
Elon Musk just axed key Twitter teams like human rights, accessibility, AI ethics and curation
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