<
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/09/28/elon-fires-half-of-extwitters-election-integrity-team-because-a-manager-liked-a-tweet-calling-him-a-fucking-dipshit/>
"There is no doubt that it’s not always easy to figure out what social media
websites should do about election disinformation. There are those who believe
that websites need to very actively remove such content, but there’s little
evidence that straight removal does very much productive, which is why it
wasn’t that surprising that YouTube (for example) has stopped policing lies
about the 2020 election (the last Presidential election, which doesn’t mean
they won’t pay attention to upcoming election).
That said, even if you think that removing content (even election
disinformation) is counterproductive, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a clear
role for election integrity teams at various platforms. Remember, the main way
that old Twitter handled election misinformation in 2020 was to focus on
providing more information (that is, adding to the marketplace of ideas) which
some people, very wrongly, called “censorship.” Adding more information is not
censorship, it’s enabling the so-called marketplace of ideas to function
better.
Indeed, reports show that the only times Twitter was actually removing
information regarding elections was in the most extreme circumstances, such as
cases where you had people impersonating election officials on Twitter in an
attempt to mislead voters into not voting (such as by telling them the election
was on a different day), or where there were out and out frauds.
That kind of thing is still really important.
But apparently not to Elon Musk. Earlier this week it was reported that
exTwitter had disabled the feature that let users “report” election
misinformation as part of its reporting tools. That already got some people
worried about how a Musk-run exTwitter would handle many upcoming elections.
As if to confirm this was absolutely intentional, that same day, the
Information revealed that Elon fired half of the remaining “Election Integrity
Team” at exTwitter. This is despite him recently promising to expand that
effort.
Rolling Stone has way more info on all of this, including details
about what likely happened here and it’s dumber than you could have imagined."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
