Twitter’s moderation system is in tatters

The platform was showing signs of strain even before it was cut off. The team that took down toxic and fake content disappeared after the company was bought by Musk. After years of developing relationships with those teams, researchers say no one is responding to their reports of fake news on the site.

In Brazil, there was a presidential election just days after Musk took over. Observers and activists warned for months that Bolsonaro's supporters would not accept the results of the election if he lost. Researchers found that all the people who were supposed to be monitoring the platform had been fired.

“At this moment, we have nobody to reach out to,” says Nina Santos, a researcher at the Brazilian National Institute of Science & Technology in Digital Democracy. “All the people that we were talking with are no longer there.” Santos says that until Musk’s takeover, Twitter had been “quite responsive” in taking down rule-breaking content that could undermine trust in the election or spread disinformation, compared to Meta and Google. The entirety of Twitter’s Brazil team was included in the 7,500 people laid off earlier this month. Advertisement

She says that all of these are dangerous. The company will label or remove false or misleading information intended to undermine public confidence in an election or other civic process. The founder and CEO of Bot Sentinel, a project to fight misinformation and harassment on the internet, was keeping an eye on the elections in Brazil and the US. The Brazilian election was claimed to have been stolen, but it was still up on the social networking site.

The race in Maricopa County, Arizona, the state's largest county and a consistent target of right-wing election deniers, was one of the areas that saw a lot of misinformation on social media. He didn't know who to contact at the company to take down the fake accounts. He says that social networking site is a show.