How prepared is the social media site to deal with the new election misinformation? It's not looking good according to an executive.
In a live interview with Fast Company on Monday, Edward Perez, now-ex head of product management in charge of civic integrity, said that the crisis point for Twitter may come post-midterms.
Perez was in charge of the team that dealt with violent or extremists on the platform. He worked for the company for a full year before Musk bought it. He said that Musk's recent decision to ax 50% of its employees, including multiple ethics teams, may do a lot of harm in the future.
Perez, who is in charge of election technology research for the OSET Institute, said that efforts to decry the legitimacy of the 2020 election are already underway. A majority of GOP candidates have questioned the legitimacy or have denied President Joe Biden's victory two years ago, and several of them are vying for Secretary of State positions that have the power to impact future U.S. elections.
There will most likely be allegations of election fraud without any evidence to back them up. There will be more claims that the voting technology did not work correctly as well as more legal wrangling to get certain ballots or entire election results overturned.
Even though the company is moving into the next few weeks, it is not certain how much of the team is still in their positions. Perez was worried that the focus on Musk's rants had distracted from the elephant in the room that will be the role of the social media company after Tuesday. He said that Musk doesn't fully understand the degree of social responsibility that rests on his shoulders.
Perez told Fast Company that there aren't infinite resources and they don't have infinite numbers of people.
Musk has only been at the micro-messaging service for two weeks. The content moderation team was unable to work as the billionaire settled into his new position. The platform was filled with a lot of hate speech as Musk closed the deal. On Monday, the day before the majority of U.S. voters were set to cast their ballots, Musk recommended to independent-minded voters that they vote for a Republican congress.
Musk claimed that he agrees with some Democrat and Republican policies, but not all. Republicans seem to enjoy Musk's thoughts about "free speech", even though he has caught a lot of flak from Democrats.
It's hypocritical of Musk to be nothing if not hypocritical. He has banned parody accounts of himself since buying the platform. Back in April, when the world's richest man started this whole Twitter drama, he said that for it to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral. One could argue that the owner is sharing his own opinion, but by pinning it on his page, he has become the main spokesman for the Republicans.
While he claimed that sharing power is a must for a stable democracy, it ignores the fact that over half of the Republican candidates in both congressional and state elections have claimed there was something questionable about the 2020 election.
Will the endorsement by the biggest twit change the votes? It fogs up an otherwise very dirty window into how a new wave of election misinformation might be handled by the social networking site.
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