Time.news – The case of the devastating cuts to the Twitter workforce last Friday, four days before the American mid-term elections, has literally sent the electoral campaign schemes of Democrats and Republicans into a tailspin, fueling the anxieties of offices and electoral staff who have counted on the skills of the men of the social network to help them fight violent threats and viral lies.
The result is that the mass layoffs have shaken up the usual teams of social media computer technicians with the bird dedicated to the fight against electoral disinformation, which has contributed to adding to the normal context other misleading tweets in communication with journalists, public officials and staff. of the election campaign. Indispensable personnel who should have been alerted in this decisive weekend for the midterm elections in order to “monitor signs of foreign disinformation, spam and other problematic content around the vote”.
Regarding Twitter’s reduction in force, unfortunately there is no choice when the company is losing over $4M/day.
Everyone exited was offered 3 months of severance, which is 50% more than legally required.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 4, 2022
But just as of Friday morning, Twitter employee access to internal tools used for content moderation continued to be rather narrow in the ranks, while limiting and holding back the ability of staff to respond to current misinformation.
Also because Twitter, as the Post notes, “has become one of the most influential American platforms for disseminating voting information and the days leading up to the elections there were often critical moments in which company and campaign officials maintained a dialogue. almost constant on the potential risks “that could have occurred or really existed, because the task of the employees is to monitor online threats, with the risk that the cuts would interrupt the lines of communication between the company and the police with the possible purpose of identifying people who exercise electoral intimidation or offline violence. So much so that on Friday President Biden criticized Twitter’s primary role in spreading false information.
Obviously, in the meantime the traffic has moved on to alternative platforms, happy for the possibility of less content moderation on Twitter. So much so that a user with more than 72,000 followers on the Telegram chat app, the Post points out, “celebrated the changes that were happening ‘right before the US elections’ so that whatever happens on Tuesday … many more people. they’ll talk about it on Twitter. “Seeing is believing, we’ll talk about it again.