After Elon Musk laid off thousands from Twitter’s staff, worries amass about how the platform will handle misinformation ahead of the 2022 midterms.
For years, Twitter has been a leader in countering misinformation and protecting elections. It was often ahead of its peers in creating and enforcing new policies, and it was the first major platform to ban former President Donald Trump after the Capitol insurrection, pushing others to follow suit.
But concerns are growing that tumult inside Twitter in the first week after it was acquired by Elon Musk could weaken its safeguards for elections, just before the midterms are set to take place.
Musk’s Twitter laid off thousands of employees across the company last week, including cuts to its public policy and trust and safety teams, and extensive cuts to its curation team, which helps elevate reliable information on the platform about elections and other news events. The chaos was only amplified over the weekend as Twitter first appeared to roll out, and then postponed, a controversial plan allowing any user to pay to be verified — a proposal critics had said would cause confusion during the midterms about which accounts and tweets users could trust.
Musk promised not to alter any of Twitter’s content policies until after the midterms. But the changes he has already made to the company have left it weakened and vulnerable, said Paul Barrett, deputy director of New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights.
«The Musk-induced Category 5 hurricane at Twitter has the potential to disrupt the midterms,» Barrett said, «because large numbers of Twitter employees who otherwise would be paying attention to misuse of the platform have already been fired, are worrying that they’re next on the chopping block, or are distracted by the plight of co-workers being ushered out the door.»
The threats Twitter could face on Election Day and its aftermath include known risks, such as misleading claims of election fraud, attempts at voter intimidation or violent rhetoric, Barrett said. But the disarray at Twitter also means the company will be even less equipped to identify and counter novel manipulation tactics for which there is no playbook, he added.
US officials overseeing the election say there is so far no evidence of any specific or credible threats to election infrastructure, but made clear private platforms such as Twitter are on their own, and responsible for managing any misinformation that may appear on their sites.
«We don’t flag anything to platforms around misinformation, disinformation,» Jen Easterly, director of the US government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), told CNN Saturday evening. «That is entirely up to those platforms — Twitter, social media — based on their terms of service and how they enforce it.»
Deep cuts
Twitter has said it’s still committed to protecting elections and that the job cuts last week — which struck half of the company’s workforce — were less extensive in its trust and safety team, where about 15% of workers were let go.
Twitter didn’t respond to a request for comment for this story, and attempts to reach one company spokesperson resulted in an email bounce-back message that implied they were no longer with the company. The layoffs appear to have hit large swaths of Twitter’s PR team, with numerous officials saying their time at the company has ended, including Brian Poliakoff, Twitter’s global head of corporate and customer communications, and Julie Steele, its former head of internal communications.
