The company formerly known as Twitter is scaling back efforts to tackle misinformation on the platform, having laid off roughly half of the team devoted to preserving election integrity, according to a new report from The Information. The bloodletting, which affected four Dublin-based employees, including the team’s head, reportedly leaves no more than six people focused on threat disruption at the company, most of them based in North America. (Prior to Elon Musk’s acquisition, the team numbered around two dozen.) One of the people reportedly given the pink slip was Aaron Rodericks, a team co-lead who last Friday secured a temporary injunction from an Irish court preventing X from disciplining him after he liked a number of tweets critical of Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino. It comes less than a month after X pledged to expand its safety and elections teams, with Yaccarino echoing that promise in a Wednesday interview with the Financial Times. That same day, however, an Australian digital research group noticed that X appeared to have removed an option that lets users in some markets report election disinformation.
