X lays off half of its election integrity staffers

Something weird happening at Elon Musk’s X is about as predictable as the return of pumpkin-spiced coffee.

This week, The Information reported that the platform will cut “around half of the global team devoted to limiting disinformation and election fraud on the platform.”

The layoffs, which come ahead of next year’s US presidential election, happened about a month after the company said in a blog post that it was “expanding [its] safety and elections teams to focus on combating manipulation, surfacing inauthentic accounts and closely monitoring the platform for emerging threats.”

To make matters even more awkward, in a profile of X CEO Linda Yaccarino published by the Financial Times this week, the former NBCU executive “assured” the reporter that the company would be expanding those teams.

“Decimating their election integrity team—on top of last year’s firings—means that X will continue to be a toxic hellscape that people and advertisers should avoid,” Kyle Morse, deputy executive director of the nonprofit Tech Oversight Project, said in a blog post.

This week, researchers also noticed that X has removed a feature that let users “self-report political misinformation.”

+1: On Wednesday, Yaccarino spoke at the Code Conference in an interview that was described as “awkward at times” by the Wall Street Journal. During the interview, she said the platform should turn a profit by early next year. Before she spoke, former Twitter head of trust and safety Yoel Roth told the audience that advertising safety on the platform isn't what it used to be. Earlier this month, Musk tweeted that ad revenue on X is down 60%, but didn’t share a time frame.