The new normal of election disinformation

PO1 William "Chip" Nagel good day Brother William, always informational and of the most interesting. Thanks for sharing, have a blessed day!

PO1 William "Chip" Nagel
..."New owner, new rules?
But as the trolling campaign shows, his ownership is already having an impact. And Musk himself is engaging in his characteristic chaos: one moment pledging to advertisers that Twitter won't become a "free-for-all hellscape," the next tweeting to his 112 million followers a lurid, baseless conspiracy theory about the violent attack on Paul Pelosi. (Musk eventually deleted the tweet, but not before it was retweeted and liked tens of thousands of times.)

That's left many people — including people inside Twitter working on trust and safety — increasingly agitated about the company's willingness and capacity to deal with misleading information about voting and candidates, threats to election workers, and the possibility of premature or false claims of victory.

This week, Twitter froze some employee access to content moderation tools, Bloomberg reported. Musk also laid off swaths of employees on Friday, including members of the curation team who tackle misinformation and contextualize news on the platform, according to employees.

"We're still enforcing our rules at scale," Yoel Roth, Twitter's head of safety and integrity, tweeted in response to the Bloomberg story.

But what happens when the person potentially breaking them is Twitter's owner, CEO and sole director?

That's just one of the questions my colleagues and I on NPR's disinformation and democracy team will be examining as we head into the midterms, the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign, and key elections around the world."

It is not the "new normal" but profoundly abnormal and criminal.

Rich