Information reaching Kossyderrickent has it that Elon Musk fired an entire Election Integrity Team from X for undermining election integrity.
It was not immediately clear how many people were slashed from team, but The Information first reported four Dublin-based employees were impacted, including the team’s head, Aaron Rodericks, citing a person familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The cuts come less than a month after X said it was expanding its safety and elections team to “focus on combating manipulation, surfacing inauthentic accounts and closeby monitoring the platform for emerging threats.” This unit was created to identify threats from foreign and domestic sources by “posting or sharing content that may suppress participation, mislead people about when, where, and how to participate in a civic process, or lead to offline violence during an election.”
We now head into the critically important 2024 elections with no guard rails on perhaps the most influential platform in American politics. What could go wrong?
Maybe this is one of the reasons why Elon Musk bought Twitter in the first place. X has come under fire recently for reports from anti-hate-speech organizations showing the platform did not take action on numerous “extreme hate speech” posts.
Since taking over the platform last fall, Musk has made a series of controversial choices including mass layoffs, firing top executives, and launching the Twitter Blue program, which requires users to pay a monthly subscription for a verification check. In its August announcement, the social media platform touted the enforcement of its Civic Integrity policy, which sets both safety standards and rules for election interference, unauthenticated media, and deceptive identities.
The cuts come amid Musk’s larger efforts to pullback on some of the site’s content moderation measures. These include a limit on how many posts users can read in a day, while also reinstating previously suspended accounts like that of former President Trump.
