It’s been just over a week since Elon Musk finalized his deal to buy Twitter, but the Tesla billionaire has already transformed the company.
He laid off 50% of his staff last week, prompting public goodbye messages and hand-wringing over the future of the service after such dramatic cuts. His takeover has coincided with a dramatic rise in hate speech, and despite Musk’s promise not to turn the platform into a “free-for-all hellscape,” many advertisers worry about how he will oversee the service — particularly in the context of the US – Midterm elections on Tuesday.
Now Twitter’s former director of product management says the layoffs could hamper the service’s handling of election-related issues.
“I’m really concerned that it feels like the takeover drama is sucking all the oxygen in the room,” Edward Perez told Wired in a story published Monday, adding that the focus is on the Musk drama “Potentially insufficient attention leads to these election-related issues.”
Twitter’s civil integrity team worked under Perez before he quit in September to slow the spread of disinformation and misinformation — with the primary goal of protecting public conversation on duty about civil society processes. On Friday, Perez said he didn’t know how many of the team’s more than 100 members retained their positions.
Halving the company’s workforce just days before the midterms would potentially leave insufficient staff to do the “very complex work” needed ahead of the election – and it’s hard to imagine the layoffs won’t have a “material impact.” would have, he said.
“It is not entirely clear to me – especially in a political context – that Elon Musk fully understands the scale of social responsibility that rests on his shoulders and the very real harm, political harm, political violence and division that social media can wreak platforms,” said Perez.
After the job cuts, he’s not sure there will be enough people left to analyze what Twitter’s machine-learning-based policing system detects, whether those models will work to identify harmful words in posts, or whether they’ll detect questionable content will be marked.
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“I don’t know the answer to any of this,” he said. “But it sure doesn’t look good if you cut 50 percent of the very talented people,” he said.
Perez added that the downsizing issue extends well beyond Election Day on Nov. 8.
“It’s a very, very challenging and complex problem to mitigate the damaging effects of all this disinformation,” Perez said. “And I can’t think of a worse time for Elon Musk to cut Twitter’s resources off at the knees.”
As for Musk, on Monday he gave his nearly 115 million Twitter followers his recommendation on which political party to vote for.
“Shared power curbs the worst excesses of either party, so I recommend voting for a Republican Congress because the presidency is Democratic,” he said saidwhich is aimed at “independent-minded voters”.
Twitter did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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