Media decries loss of Twitter employees 'charged with protecting the midterm elections' after Musk layoffs

Media outlets began worrying about "protecting the midterm elections" as soon as Elon Musk started firing Twitter employees when he took over the company last month. 

On Oct. 31, Bloomberg reported that many of the employees that Musk had begun laying off included members responsible for "content moderation" and the social media platform would therefore be "short-handed" during the midterm elections. 

"The scaled-back content moderation has raised concerns among employees on Twitter’s Trust and Safety team, who believe the company will be short-handed in enforcing policies in the run-up to the U.S. midterm election on Nov. 8. Trust and Safety employees are often tasked with enforcing Twitter’s misinformation and civic integrity policies — many of the same policies that former President Donald Trump routinely violated before and after the 2020 elections, the company said at the time," Bloomberg writers reported.

A later report and tweet from Bloomberg more explicitly expressed "concerns" over Twitter’s ability to "monitor" the upcoming elections.

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"Will Twitter be able to monitor the US midterms with half the staff?" the site’s official Twitter account posted on Friday while promoting the article "Twitter Cuts Spur Concerns About US Midterms, Human Rights."

Other media outlets quickly followed suit in fearing an increase of "misinformation" without Twitter properly monitoring content.

NBC News "disinformation" reporter Ben Collins referred to the Twitter situation as a "nightmare" while appearing on MSNBC’s "Craig Melvin Reports" on Friday.

"The most important thing that Twitter employees want to stress is the company is a nightmare right now and you cannot work there. And the website is built on sticks and it might fall apart. It’s a house of cards. If it falls apart by Tuesday, we’re in trouble in terms of getting election information out there," Collins said.

CNN correspondent Donie O’Sullivan claimed on "CNN Newsroom" Saturday that the timing of the layoffs is meant to coincide with the midterm elections and will enhance the threat of misinformation.

"The timing of this right before the midterm elections, if you think back to 2020, on Election Day and Election Week there were all these tweets, all these viral videos that kept alleging to show voter fraud, voter fraud, voter fraud. Most of them, once they were fact-checked, once we looked into them, all proved to be bogus. And Twitter at the time was trying to fight it, but today we learned that Twitter has cut most, many of the people they have at the company fighting misinformation," O’Sullivan said.

The segment also quoted former Twitter executive Jason Goldman who specifically blamed Musk for being "contemptuous" of Twitter’s protections against misinformation.

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"I think, rightly, post-2016, Twitter started playing a much more active role. The problem is it seems that Elon seems to be fairly contemptuous of that role and a lot of his free speech protestations aren’t really about protecting free speech. It’s really about trying to put his thumb on the scale for a particular type of political preference that he and some of his cohort have," Goldman said.

A Forbes headline on the topic also described the situation as Musk laying off people "charged with protecting the midterm elections."

"Teams of employees at Twitter who were responsible for monitoring the upcoming midterm elections on the platform have been decimated as part of mass layoffs implemented today by new owner Elon Musk. Those that remain say they do not have access to critical tools used for certain content moderation decisions, sources in a position to know told Forbes," Forbes staff writers reported.

The Washington Post used harsher language describing the situation, claiming that Twitter had "gutted" the election information teams just days before Election Day.

"Devastating cuts to Twitter’s workforce on Friday, four days before the midterm elections, are fueling anxieties among political campaigns and election offices that have counted on the social network’s staff to help them combat violent threats and viral lies," Drew Harwell, Cat Zakrzewski and Isaac Stanley-Becker wrote.

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On Friday, reports confirmed that Musk was moving forward with plans to lay off half of the 7,500 Twitter employees in an effort to reshape the workforce. Several high-profile senior management officials, including former CEO Parag Agrawal, Chief Finanical Officer Ned Segal, and policy chief Vijaya Gadde, had already been fired prior to the announcement.