Twitter now X is in news again and the reason is something that we’ve heard several times in the last one year since Musk’s acquisition. The company has once again reduced headcounts. Elon Musk, the owner of X has reportedly fired the half of the company’s election integrity team, raising concerns about the platform’s ability to protect users from the misinformation and interference in upcoming 2024 elections.
The cuts, which were first reported by The Information, affected four Dublin-based employees, including the team’s head, Aaron Rodericks. The move comes less than a month after Musk pledged to expand X’s safety and elections teams. The job cut was confirmed by Elon Musk on Twitter on Wednesday.
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“Oh you mean the “Election Integrity” Team that was undermining election integrity? Yeah, they’re gone,” he wrote.
Reportedly, X’s executives told the team in Dublin that “having integrity employees based in Europe wasn’t necessary.” It is unclear exactly how many employees were let go from the election integrity team, but the cuts are believed to have brought down the team size by roughly half. Before Musk’s acquisition, the team had around 30 employees.
The latest job cut comes after Musk last month hinted to expand the team. The New York Post previously wrote that X was planning to expand its “Trust and Safety” team by adding content moderators to the team and a head of civic integrity as full-time employees.
The company recently also posted job openings on its “threat disruption” team and published a blog post titled “Supporting people’s right to accurate and safe political discourse on X.”
“We’re currently expanding our safety and elections teams to focus on combating manipulation, surfacing inauthentic accounts and closely monitoring the platform for emerging threats,” the company wrote in the blog post.
Musk has been a vocal critic of X’s previous moderation efforts, and has said that he believes the platform should be more open to free speech. However, the cuts to the election integrity team have raised concerns that Musk is not taking the threat of misinformation and interference seriously enough.
“Since taking charge of X, Elon Musk has used the platform to foment antisemitism, hate speech, and disinformation — playing into the hands of bad actors like Russia, China, and Iran,” said Kyle Morse, the deputy executive director of the Tech Oversight Project. “Decimating their election integrity team — on top of last year’s firings — means that X will continue to be a toxic hellscape that people and advertisers should avoid.”
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