By MATT O’BRIEN and DAVID KLEPPER, AP Technology Author
Twitter is struggling to reply to political misinformation and other harmful posts on the social media platform after Elon Musk fired roughly half of its workforce just days before the U.S. midterm elections, in keeping with employees who survived the cuts and an out of doors voting rights group.
The recent mass layoffs spared lots of the people whose job it’s to maintain hate and misinformation off the social-media platform. Musk cut just 15% of those frontline content-moderation employees, in comparison with roughly 50% job cuts companywide, an executive said last week.
But in preparation for the layoffs, employees said the corporate also sharply reduced what number of employees can look into a particular account’s digital history and behavior — a practice crucial to research if it’s been used maliciously and take motion to suspend it. The corporate said it froze access to those tools to scale back “insider risk” at a time of transition.
The developments are causing concern because the U.S. midterm elections culminate on Tuesday. Though hundreds of thousands of Americans have already solid early and absentee ballots, hundreds of thousands more are expected to go to the polls to solid in-person votes. Election watchers fear the platform will not be equipped to handle hate speech, misinformation that might impact voter safety and security, and actors in search of to solid doubt on the legitimate winners of elections across the country.
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Researchers tracking misinformation ahead of the midterms notified Twitter on Friday about three posts from well-known far-right figures that advanced debunked claims about election fraud. The posts remain up three days later. When Common Cause asked Twitter for an update on Monday, the platform said the posts were “under review.”
Before Musk took over, Twitter responded far more quickly, said Jesse Littlewood, vice chairman for campaigns at Common Cause. The group said that they had been in regular contact with Twitter staff before Musk took over. Now, they’re getting a response from a generic email address.
“We had been getting much faster decisions from them, sometimes inside hours,” said Littlewood. Now, he said, “It’s like pushing the button for the walk sign on the stop light, and nothing is occurring.”
Musk gutted teams working on marketing, communications and editorial curation of what people see on Twitter. But his decision to retain most of Twitter’s content moderation team got here as a welcome surprise to some inside and out of doors the corporate. Musk, in any case, promised to let free speech flourish by loosening Twitter’s content restrictions and restoring accounts banned for violating those rules. He has also pledged to finish the present user verification system in favor of a $7.99 subscription fee.
However the incontrovertible fact that the content moderation team survived could mean that critical misinformation functions reminiscent of blocking incitements of political violence will proceed, and among the worst-case scenarios around election misinformation won’t be realized. A few of Musk’s own tweets have been annotated with fact-checked context in recent days.
Two employees who survived the job cuts credit a previously little-known executive Yoel Roth, Twitter’s global head of safety and integrity, for leveraging his team’s importance to Musk’s goals for Twitter while avoiding moves that may anger the mercurial Tesla CEO.
“Yoel Roth singlehandedly saved the corporate,” said a Twitter worker who spoke on condition of anonymity due to concerns about job security. “On the general public side, he appropriately and thoughtfully engaged with Elon Musk in a way that was not subservient, but deferring, because Elon is the king.”
Roth has change into the general public face of Twitter’s content moderation since Musk took over and has repeatedly defended Twitter’s ongoing efforts to fight harmful misinformation. Musk, a prolific tweeter with greater than 110 million followers, has often pointed to Roth’s Twitter feed as essentially the most reliable account of the corporate’s adherence to integrity standards. And the billionaire, who embraces the concept Twitter’s past leadership suppressed right-wing views, defended Roth when ardent Musk supporters demanded his firing over past comments they thought showed Roth’s liberal bias.
Roth, who once worked at an Apple store fixing Mac computers, joined Twitter in 2015 after spending a 12 months studying online hate speech at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Web and Society, in keeping with his LinkedIn profile. In May, he took on a senior role “answerable for all user, content, and security policies, comprising greater than 120 policymakers, threat investigators, data analysts, and operations specialists.”
Roth didn’t reply to requests for comment.
A legal scholar who sits on Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council, an advisory board arrange in 2016, said she has long been impressed with Roth’s candor concerning the challenges of content moderation and the nuances of free speech — reminiscent of the importance of curbing abusive content to enable the free speech of girls and others more prone to be harassed online.
“If Musk had been in a position to cut everybody in content moderation and just replace it together with his ‘yes’ men, he probably would have,” said Mary Anne Franks, a law professor on the University of Miami and president of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative. “The one reason why he hasn’t is because he possibly recognizes that might make Twitter unworkable.”
One Twitter worker said Monday that layoff survivors were actively in search of latest jobs partly due to Musk’s lack of commitment to keeping the platform freed from hate speech and misinformation. Speaking anonymously due to concerns about job security, the worker said the job cuts would make Twitter’s staff less effective in following up and acting on complaints about election-related disinformation, because they included people leading civic integrity teams.
Franks said there’s at all times been a tension inside Twitter and other social media firms between earning profits and protecting democracy and freedom of expression. She said that is only getting harder under Musk, who has shown Twitter can act quickly in banning a comedian who made fun of him by impersonating his account, but who has otherwise expressed hostility towards Twitter’s anti-abuse standards.
“I’d imagine that somebody able like Roth’s at Twitter would need to play a fairly delicate game trying to not trip any of the wires, to not trigger a backlash from Musk because he’s incredibly thin-skinned,” Franks said.
AP Technology Author Frank Bajak contributed to this report.
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