Twitter layoffs gutted election information teams days before midterms
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
[1] https://twitter.com/yoyoel/status/1588657228462317568
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/11/02/white-house-twitter...
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.
Every time I see people advocate for less moderation its really freedom to lie through their damn teeth.
"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."
The freedom to publish statements that the establishment (aka Ministry of Truth) deems as false.
It's also called lying.
You might think it's obvious what's true and false, but if that's the case you clearly haven't done enough philosophy...
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.
> 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 whole point in either case is that what is being reported is accurate and verified.
I think Twitter moderation these days is pretty transparent and fact-based when they take action.
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.
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. Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect[1]
2. Ligma Johnson[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...
[2] https://www.wionews.com/world/ligma-johnson-two-pranksters-p...
> Most of the 2,000+ content moderators working on front-line review were not impacted, and access will be fully restored in the coming days.
An implication here is that engineering was hit that much harder.
(Assuming that "most of" doesn't mean "50% + 1")
If you're going to vote, be responsible and do a diligent background check on the candidates and measures in your district. Check their funding sources (opensecrets). Check their voting history, if they're an incumbent. See what donors and PACs they owe loyalty to. Yes, it takes a little time, and you may have to deal with Google or other search engines presenting biased results, but then at least you have some idea what you're really voting for.
However, I personally think these Congressmembers have very little real power or decision-making capability. They're lower down in the state-corporate hierarchy, with the actual Central Committee consisting of people like CEOs of the major defense contractors, investment banks and hedge funds, fossil fuel producers, technology and communications corporation, etc. The American government is essentially an oligarchic or plutocratic system, with politicians and bureaucrats acting as little more than middle managers.
When do polls open? When do they close? What IDs do you need to vote? Can you register when you vote? Where are polling places? Did channel X actually call a race? Is the number of votes that voted actually the number the state offices released? Is voting day Tuesday or Wednesday?
Not everything is grey and interpretation based. I’m not looking for them to call if Biden is a good president or Herschel Walker is qualified. Just stop people from committing voter suppression (which is illegal anyway) with demonstrably false facts.
That’s true. I don’t trust twitters moderation team to limit themselves to those facts even a teeny, tiny bit.
Is Twitter such critical election infrastructure now that if it’s trending information is not perfect the provenance of the election is now in question?
If so, how long has Twitter been this important? Would elections function without it? How much “misinformation” is enough for the election to be suspect?
Is this concern simply limited to what’s on Twitter itself and not, ya know, out in the citizenry?
Just kidding.. people here are just upset that facts hurt their preferred candidate in 2020.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/16/technology/twitter-new-yo...
“The best approach” is to throw your employees under the bus and personally shame them in public on a matter that could very legitimately put themselves and their families at risk?
Get real.
Yes, they changed their https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/hacked-materi... according to https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/16/twitter-changes-its-hacked...
> With just a few weeks to go before the Nov. 3 vote, […] Twitter underlined just how fluid its policies were when it began letting users share links to an unsubstantiated New York Post article about Hunter Biden that it had previously blocked from its service.
This link literally says the opposite of what you are saying.
They allowed the article to be shared a few weeks before the election. They kept the NY Post account banned until October 31st. 1 week before the election.[1]
This was meaningful censorship of a right-leaning news organization. It would not have happened were the shoe on the other foot at a liberal bastion like Twitter.
The solution to the problem is to greatly pare back the type of moderation allowed by the platform. Elon seems to be implementing this.[2]
1. https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/twitter-unblocks-new-y...
2. https://nypost.com/2022/04/26/elon-musk-says-suspending-ny-p...
I think Twitter made the wrong call but it’s not like this was the Pentagon Papers or the Lewinsky story.
Imagine the outrage if Elon tomorrow decided to suspend one of these news orgs, even with only a few days to go before the election. Compare that to the crickets we hear about the NY Post.
If there’s a left wing analog to NYPost, I can definitely imagine an article getting deboosted or banned under similar conditions.
Prior to that Twitter had never taken such action against a news outlet.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/oct/30/twitter-n...
It honestly takes a lot of belief in fantasy to think an entity capable of hacking multiple 2FA services, major corporations and multiple governments, did so and planted evidence on a laptop. Then gave that laptop away on the hope that the shop owner would discover it and give it to the news.
It seems far more likely that the incestuous child molester who filters millions of dollars in bribes annually dropped off one of his connected laptops then forgot about it and failed to pay because he has abused cocaine for 3+ decades.
So I think your claim that 'it would not have happened if the shoe were on the other foot' is false -- because it did happen in a significant way, and not one favourable to your imagined 'Liberal Establishment'.
Wiki has a well-cited article on the topic that's probably worth your attention: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_... -- specifically the social media section.
Several of the emails found on the laptop make it look as though Hunter was selling influence/access to his father to foreign companies and other foreign entities. Whether or not Joe was in on it is not certain, but several of the foreign parties Hunter was working with certainly seemed to think it got them something of value.
Twitter just doesn’t seem to be used that way. It’s mostly just hot takes, flaming, journalists arguing, and occasionally people mobbing to try to get some random person fired from their job.
I'm not trying to say, fix Twitter and everything is fixed. But I take issue with the argument that it doesn't matter bc it has a small audience relative to other networks. It has been useful to reach a certain demographic and has real-life impact.
1. Based on my reading it seems like by mid afternoon cell reception on the mall and around the capitol was spotty at best and degrading. It seems unlikely many would have seen the tweet.
2. As noted prior, we know for a fact that the few organized parts of the mod did so via Facebook and to some extent signal. Disseminating a tweet under spotty connections through a secondary network is a leap with no supporting evidence.
3. Given the previous two points if the hypothesis is correct there should have been a time delay of more than a minute or two.
4. This isn’t really how mobs work. People are going to be more attuned to the feeling of the moment and the events happening physically around them.
5. No corroborating evidence is provided.
6. Even if true, twitter was neither necessary nor sufficient to explain the mob. The claim you made up thread was that people like trump are whipping up mobs on twitter but the provided example is too many degrees removed to support such a strong claim.
That seems to be the opinion of everyone regardless of political opinion: if Twitter truly didn't matter, the people who got kicked out of it wouldn't make such a big deal out of it. The fact that they do mean that they agree it's an important platform.
> if Twitter truly didn't matter, the people who got kicked out of it wouldn't make such a big deal out of it
I'm pretty sure that you can be trollish ass-hat and wrong at the same time. I think a lot of people tie up a lot of self worth in follower counts on twitter, but its illusory and probably not important. If you talk to any authors, musicians, or journalists with presences on twitter they'll all tell you that twitter doesn't drive traffic or sales its just a place to scream at people who mildly disagree with you.
I think the greatest trick that twitter ever pulled was convincing people that twitter mattered outside of twitter.
Less snarkily, I appreciate that not everyone loved their work. But their work solved a particular problem, even if it created others. Now that problem is unsolved again. It will be interesting to see if a better solution to the problem appears by 2024, or if the decision is to allow that original problem to exist.
https://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/wayoflife/08/22/mf.campaign....
> Adams' men called Vice President Jefferson "a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father."
Update to my comment. Found it: https://twitter.com/Cernovich/status/1588572920066240512 (Cernovich can have bad faith takes, but the video speaks for itself)
I remember full well when I was at a startup and the principal engineer pulled me aside and said: "you have been poking around everywhere and you have identified problems. I want you to stop talking about them otherwise the whole thing will fall apart".
As a leader, that is your immediate cue to silently work on transitioning that person out of the company and build cement where he put sticks.
EDIT: This whole commentary is really weird. Normally you publish this sort of information, if you feel like there is no one at the company that is willing to address such issues. But there has just been a leadership change and the leadership has hinted at wanting to address exactly these sort of issues. But assuming that the commentary is correct, to keep it private, to protect incompetent leadership and then publish it in hopes that the government steps in, to specifically NOT address these issues, is a logic that I can't really wrap my head around.
I can't stand the Washington Post or MSNBC, but the cure for bad faith is not to consult some other bad faith merchant. It's like ho you can find perfectly edible food in a supermarket dumpster, but that doesn't make the dumpster clean. If you're trying to maximize objectivity you can generally cast around for a better source. In this case the tweet framing is bullshit and the video has little evidentiary value other than feeding confirmation bias.
Musk is doing very much the opposite.
It may not be overt, but what they choose to publish is just as powerful as what they choose not to publish, and there have been some very high profile stories that were deliberately not published in the WaPo.
Meanwhile, the Columbia Review of Journalism (a well-respected academic source) reported in 2021 that the Post is uninfluenced by Bezos. They point out the many negative articles about Amazon and otherwise against Bezos's interests.
It's a Bezos company now, and just like all the other Bezos companies, it will consider it's owner's desired outcome before taking action.
Just flip the idea on it's head - would Bezos be happy if WaPo suddenly became a right-leaning publication tomorrow? Probably not... he might actually pick up a phone then but I digress.
The influence is implicit and persistent. There is no reason to own a newspaper other than influence. It's been that way probably forever...
Actually, again, academic analysis suggest there are two primary reasons rich people buy media outlets. One is for influence (like Murdock) and the other is for prestige (like they would buy a Van Gogh or a wing at the ballet).
> would Bezos be happy if WaPo suddenly became a right-leaning publication tomorrow?
Probably not. Those are far lower in prestige. In much the same way that people donating to an opera company would be upset if they primarily decided to use their venue for open-mic nights.
It's the reason Benjamin Franklin founded and ran various newspapers, including America's first German-language newspaper. He was trying to drum up support for the Revolution.
What stories are you thinking of here?
Even the fabled NPR has a pretty extreme political view they want you to accept. The WaPo is not different, and Bezos (and people like Bezos) only buy media organizations for the influence they provide.
There doesn't have to be any editorial edict. The unspoken obvious reality is that no Washington Post reporter is ever going to be as brazen and quick to print on an article about Bezos or Amazon as they are about Musk or Twitter or Tesla. That's bias. That's ownership affecting the product.
Without this team who will suppress “disinformation” right before an election that later turns out to be true?
We can’t have this!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/31/hunter-bi...
I’m still waiting for a fail whale. I was promised a whale!