According to Yoel Roth, the Trust & Safety organization within Twitter was mostly unaffected by these layoffs. The team size was reduced by just 15%[1] and the amount of moderation activity is largely unchanged[2]. Roth says that their "efforts on election integrity – including harmful misinformation that can suppress the vote and combatting state-backed information operations – remain a top priority." [3]
This is hyperbolic in the extreme - the only things I've seen on the election information is tagging conspiracy theories for which there is no evidence, or noting that videos going viral are faked.
Every time I see people advocate for less moderation its really freedom to lie through their damn teeth.
I think it is objectively obvious, most of the time, when a video is doctored or a false statement is presented as fact.
I'd rather not live in a place where absolutely nothing is real. Societies crumble under such a culture. Birds are considered real only because its not politically advantageous to believe they aren't real. What a dumb fucking value system to live under.
The Post's article acknowledges Roth's tweet -- but that "Trust & Safety organization" seems like a different organization than the election information team that "has worked for years to counter election-related falsehoods."
"As recently as two weeks ago, Twitter was touting the team’s debunking efforts as a key aspect of its approach to the 2022 midterms. But on Friday, multiple Twitter employees told The Washington Post the entire team appeared to have been cut amid Musk’s layoffs."
And companies very frequently cut 10-15%, just to shore up the bottom line, to prepare for a bad quarter. I work for a company that is FAMOUS for binge-and-purge hiring practices. They shed that every couple of years, and have for three decades.
More than 15% of time in big ops orgs goes to hiring so if they aren't hiring they don't need all that slack in the system to be able to do the same work output.
Did you RTFA? Roth was directly quoted by the post.
> In October 2020, ahead of the U.S. presidential election, the team added context to all trends that could be found in Twitter’s prime real estate — its “For you” and “What’s happening” boxes — on its app and website. As recently as two weeks ago, Twitter was touting the team’s debunking efforts as a key aspect of its approach to the 2022 midterms.
> But on Friday, multiple Twitter employees told The Washington Post the entire team appeared to have been cut amid Musk’s layoffs.
It's hard to know where exactly the cuts were made inside of the trust and safety org, and even how twitter is laid out internally to know whether (or how) if trust and safety intersects with departments paying attention to information ops.
anecdotally, i've seen at least a few people working in those areas laid off.
The point I'm making is to question whether we should take the Washington Post article more seriously than direct statements from named employees.
The article is making assertions based on claims made by anonymous people who claim to be Twitter employees, and that either through malice or stupidity or "telephone" style information loss, there are countless ways that this article can end up being wrong. And precisely to your earlier point, the article encourages the reader to fill in the blanks about what various departments existed, what their roles are, whether they have direct, indirect, or no effects on the material on Twitter. There is nothing accurate nor verified about any of that.
It's all intentionally hazy, and contributes to the article's overt desire to push a specific narrative rather than provide clarity.
The thing is, I generally trust established media organizations to fact-check because their integrity and reputation depends on it. Facts are often cross-checked and verified prior to publishing. Journalists have a vested interest in preventing their publications from 'he-said-she-said' rags.
Do I trust a twitter figurehead, who clearly has tweeted this for Elon's sake, more than a journalistic enterprise? No, actually. I think there's a lot to read between the lines. My questions actually came FROM the twitter thread. The article filled in more holes that the twitter thread left open.
[1] https://twitter.com/yoyoel/status/1588657228462317568
[2] https://twitter.com/yoyoel/status/1588657230836305920
[3] https://twitter.com/yoyoel/status/1588657232279130112