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With the midterm elections less than two weeks away, about 20 employees from across Twitter have volunteered to help the social network’s internal “Election Squad” enforce its rules at a crucial time for the US politics. In this week’s crash course training sessions, volunteers learned the basics of spotting election disinformation, detecting bots pushing propaganda and flagging potential violations of Twitter’s rules to the company’s policy staff .
Since 2018, the call for volunteers has been part of a comprehensive approach to major elections, with the company’s hype moderators working around the clock for a week before and after the vote to stem the tide of falsehoods viral intimidation campaigns and foreign influence operations.
But in this election cycle, the enterprise is messier than ever, increasing the risk that deceitful political operatives could use the platform to mislead voters or undermine the legitimacy of the results. Twitter has overcome a year of managerial chaos Since the CEO change, hundreds of employees have left and a senior whistleblower warned that the company lacks the resources to enforce its own election policies globally.
Adding to the uncertainty, billionaire Elon Musk is expected to close his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter on Friday. He has signaled that he will roll back Twitter’s content moderation efforts, reinstate some of its most notorious purveyors of election lies and lay off up to 75 percent of its workforce. It’s unknown how their changes will affect Twitter’s mid-term plan.
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“Given the rapid growth in the scale of disinformation since 2020, it’s reasonable to question whether they can keep up,” said Eddie Perez, Twitter’s former director of product for civic integrity., which includes its electoral policies. Perez now serves on the board of the OSET Institute, a non-profit nonprofit organization dedicated to election security and integrity.
Twitter spokeswoman Katie Rosborough confirmed the call for volunteers ahead of the midterms and said the company had already done the same during the 2020 US presidential election and the recent Brazilian election.
“People use Twitter to find reliable, real-time information about the election, and our investment in this work shows how seriously we take this responsibility,” Rosborough said.
Musk did not respond to The Post’s request for comment about what he will do in his first days of ownership. He visited Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco on Wednesday to speak with executives and is expected to address employees on Friday. Since launching its IPO, he has consistently criticized the company for what he sees as an overly censorious approach to online speech.
Musk has also suggested he might lift the company’s ban on former President Donald Trump, whose erratic tweets were capable of rewriting the country’s political agenda any day.
Twitter cannot afford to be one of the most influential websites in the world
From the Arab Spring to the Trump presidency to #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, Twitter has played a pivotal role in global politics that belies the company’s relatively small size compared to rivals like Meta and Alphabet. Like its rivals, Twitter began investing more in content moderation after revelations in 2017 of Russian-influenced campaigns using social platforms to inflame social strife in the United States ahead of the 2016 presidential election. the zeal of its employees to “protect the conversation” around major political events.
However, he has often seemed outmatched by the hordes of bots and the rate at which lies can bounce off his platform.
The midterms have been especially tricky for social media platforms like Twitter, in part because hundreds of Republican candidates have bought into former President Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen. These candidates and their supporters have taken to social media to spread conspiracies about electoral manipulation.
The stakes of Twitter’s decisions are high. Experts have said that such misinformation on social media could erode Americans’ faith in the election process. And companies have to make tough decisions about what content to keep or remove in a campaign season when control of both the House and Senate is at stake.
In August, Twitter announced a mid-term plan for 2022 that largely mimicked strategies the company deployed in previous election cycles, including promoting accurate information about the election while removing the reach of misinformation Twitter said it would apply disinformation labels or remove posts that undermine trust in the election process, including claims in 2020 that the election was rigged.
The company previously backed away from this so-called “civic integrity” policy after the 2020 election ended, despite internal concerns that election deniers were still using it to push lies and distortions, they said two people familiar with the internal discussions, who spoke about the condition. of anonymity to describe them. Rosborough said the company had “reduced enforcement” of its US election policies “as the damage and risks around the contest evolved.”
In the new election, Big Tech uses old strategies to fight the “big lie”
The company also started state-specific event hubs that promoted credible news reports about the primaries, created candidate account labels, and redesigned its labels for misinformed tweets. And it pulled volunteers from all departments away from their normal work for the next few weeks to help safeguard “the authenticity and integrity of the election-related conversation on the platform,” as the internal #ElectionSquad memo puts it.
The memo asked volunteers to sign up for four-hour shifts over a two-week period from November 1-15. They were also asked to list their foreign language skills. The whistleblower’s report audit found that Twitter had so little language capability that many of its content moderators resorted to Google Translate.
Rosborough said the election team is made up of leaders from different departments within the company who have been meeting regularly for more than a year to prepare for the election. He said calling for volunteers with specific skills was a way to “make sure we had redundancies” at a critical time, adding that it had “worked well” in past elections.
Twitter has it too conducted “a series of tabletop exercises and threat models around the middle sessions,” Rosborough said. She declined to comment on whether the company has planned what might happen to its election integrity efforts if and when Musk takes ownership.
Twitter employees involved in the company’s efforts around the midterms are moving forward for now, but many are privately worried that Musk may soon stop or undo some of their work.
“I think I could break those policies on civic integrity and stop enforcement almost immediately,” said one employee, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media. “Imagine we’re going to see a bunch of videos of voter intimidation and mis-narratives about who they are, doxing them, seeing their names trending, and nothing can be done.”