Elon Musk’s Twitter failing its first big test: Election Day
Yosef Getachew, the media and democracy program director at nonpartisan nonprofit Common Cause, told SFGATE that he is worried in particular about how Twitter will brace for the “potential onslaught” of disinformation on Election Day.
“Moving forward,” he said, “it’s incredibly unclear what the platform looks like when it comes to civic integrity policies, when it comes to enforcing these policies and whether or not there’ll be systems in place to ensure that civic integrity is prioritized.”
Twitter’s civic integrity policy, last updated in October 2021, states that posts containing any misleading information about how, when and where to vote and any information that can “cause confusion about the established laws, regulations, procedures, and methods of a civic process” can be taken down if reported.
“Twitter has had a set of election disinformation policies … in place that, although they have not been perfect, have provided some measure of predictability and stability and a set of processes that allowed folks to flag and report issues as they come up,” Goodman said. Yoel Roth, the new head of safety and integrity at Twitter, has yet to share any new guidance about election misinformation. For Getachew, it’s been proof that Musk’s inexperience in operating a social media platform means that he’s treated Twitter like just any other startup, with a “‘move fast and break things’ approach similar to what Facebook, Google and other platforms have done over the years.
“We’ve seen the damage that kind of approach has caused to our democracy, what that’s meant for things like election protection and intimidation and incitement of violence,” he said.
Election Day is the first large-scale test of San Francisco tech giant Twitter ’s content moderation policy in the age of Elon Musk — and already, it seems like the site is rife with misinformation.Conservative figures on Twitter like Charlie Kirk and Harmeet K. Dhillon are broadly spreading misinformation about the Maricopa County elections in Arizona, falsely claiming that provisional ballots provided to voters will not be counted. The falsehood has also been disseminated by Republican Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake. Election experts who spoke to SFGATE in the days leading up to Tuesday expressed concerns about how rapidly this false information would spread on the day of the midterm elections.Yosef Getachew, the media and democracy program director at nonpartisan nonprofit Common Cause, told SFGATE that he is worried in particular about how Twitter will brace for the “potential onslaught” of disinformation on Election Day .“Moving forward,” he said, “it’s incredibly unclear what the platform looks like when it comes to civic integrity policies , when it comes to enforcing these policies and whether or not there’ll be systems in place to ensure that civic integrity is prioritized.” Twitter ’s civic integrity policy, last updated in October 2021, states that posts containing any misleading information about how, when and where to vote and any information that can “cause confusion about the established laws, regulations, procedures, and methods of a civic process” can be taken down if reported. Misleading claims about ballots, such as those Kirk, Dhillon and Lake shared, are also grounds for removing posts — and with enough violations, banning the user entirely, according to the policy.Getachew said the most widespread piece of misinformation he’s seen so far involves conspiracies about which votes will or won’t be counted. Many of these posts claim that provisional ballots or mail-in ballots will not count — and that voters should watch their ballots be tabulated. These theories are often tied to former President Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” from the 2020 election, in which he falsely claims that he won the election over President Joe Biden.Provisional and mail-in ballots “are core ways that many people vote now, and the folks who are trying to suppress votes are continuing to spread disinformation about these things,” Getachew said. Twitter ’s shift in power to Musk — and the mass layoffs and feature drops under his ownership — has made an already precarious election cycle on social media at large all the more troubling on his platform. Musk has repeatedly said he wants to protect “free speech” on Twitter , but in practice, this often seems to amount to him setting policies based on ego and the whims of his followers. (It does not help that Musk himself, despite assuring that the platform would remain nonpartisan under his watch, tweeted out his support for Republican candidates to his 115 million followers.)A crucial component to controlling the misinformation and disinformation on Twitter is having the staff to handle the multiheaded hydra that is content moderation on Election Day . But the recent layoffs affected some crucial teams, posts from laid-off employees revealed, entirely gutting the social and editorial, curation, ethical AI and human rights divisions of the website.
Rachel Goodman, counsel at nonpartisan organization Protect Democracy, told SFGATE that she is concerned about this loss of institutional knowledge.
“ Twitter has had a set of election disinformation policies … in place that, although they have not been perfect, have provided some measure of predictability and stability and a set of processes that allowed folks to flag and report issues as they come up,” Goodman said. “Those processes all have humans in the loop, and many of those humans no longer work for Twitter , so the way that’s all going to work going forward at this very important time is really unclear.”The front-facing teams that were gutted in the layoffs, from the trust and safety team to the curation teams, were key in moderating content and platforming reliable information on Twitter , Getachew said. (Per the Associated Press, content moderation staffers were spared at a higher rate, with 15% getting the sack compared to roughly 50% of Twitter ’s staff overall being affected by the cuts.)Without these teams intact, Twitter has to rely largely on its users for any semblance of content moderation or news dissemination — whether in the form of trends that pop up on the platform or user-generated “context” on a tweet. The team behind Moments, often a reliable source of information selected and elevated by Twitter itself, has seemingly been gutted entirely.Already, advertisers have fled the platform en masse because of Musk’s lax approach to content moderation. “To the extent that Elon Musk is concerned about keeping advertisers on the platform and reassuring advertisers,” Goodman said, “making the platform a place where election-related misinformation can thrive just in the days before Election Day certainly seems like a poor choice.”Musk was initially planning on launching a free-for-all blue-check verification in the days leading up to the election, but after backlash (and with the product already not functioning for many users), he pulled an about-face — postponing the launch until after the election.SFGATE reached out to Twitter for comment about its Election Day practices but did not receive an immediate response. Yoel Roth, the new head of safety and integrity at Twitter , has yet to share any new guidance about election misinformation . (Musk’s companies, for what it’s worth, are notoriously averse to having public relations teams; Tesla’s was reportedly dissolved in October 2020.)Both Getachew and Goodman caution that the sheer instability of the past two weeks alone is enough for misinformation to sprout. For Getachew, it’s been proof that Musk’s inexperience in operating a social media platform means that he’s treated Twitter like just any other startup, with a “‘move fast and break things’ approach similar to what Facebook, Google and other platforms have done over the years.“We’ve seen the damage that kind of approach has caused to our democracy, what that’s meant for things like election protection and intimidation and incitement of violence,” he said. “That can be the trajectory we’re heading towards on Twitter .”
