Around half of the “election integrity” team at X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, has been laid off, per reports, with Elon Musk agreeing that the team had in fact undermined election integrity.
Responding to news reports on X/Twitter about the drop in employee numbers at the election integrity department, Elon Musk responded:
“Oh you mean the “Election Integrity” Team that was undermining election integrity? Yeah, they’re gone.”
Oh you mean the “Election Integrity” Team that was undermining election integrity? Yeah, they’re gone.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 27, 2023
According to a report in the Information, X/Twitter had announced plans to expand its election integrity team ahead of 2024 — but a month after the announcement, the company cut its election integrity team by half instead.
Via the Information:
Elon Musk’s X, formerly known as Twitter, is cutting around half of the global team devoted to limiting disinformation and election fraud on the platform, including the head of the group, according to three people familiar with the situation.
The cuts come less than a month after the company said it would expand the team and as X faces renewed criticism from the European Commission over the volume of misinformation on its platform. Meantime, other social media companies are gearing up to deal with disinformation and artificial intelligence during next year’s presidential elections in the U.S.
“Election integrity” teams at major social media platforms, along with “trust and safety” departments, were cultivated by the censorship industry after 2016, and actively interfered in the 2020 election. Twitter, before it was bought and rebranded by Musk, censored then-president Donald Trump on numerous occasions in the runup to that election, citing “election integrity” as a pretext.
This practice — branding the censorship of a political candidate and interference in the election as “election integrity,” was a common rhetorical tactic used by Big Tech censors and their allies in NGOs, media companies, and the deep state in 2020.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election. Follow him on Twitter @AllumBokhari.