Elon Musk reducing 50% of Twitter staff earlier than the midterms ‘doesn’t look good,’ former Twitter election supervisor mentioned

He laid off 50% of its employees final week, prompting public goodbye messages and hand-wringing concerning the service’s future after such dramatic cuts. His takeover coincided with a dramatic uptick in hate speech, and regardless of Musk’s promise to keep away from turning the platform right into a “free-for-all hellscape,” many advertisers fear about how he’ll police the service—notably associated to the U.S. midterm elections on Tuesday. 

Now, Twitter’s former director of product administration, says the layoffs may hamper the service’s dealing with of election-related points. 

“I actually am involved that it feels just like the drama round company takeover is sucking up all of the oxygen within the room,” Edward Perez advised Wired in a narrative printed Monday, including that the give attention to the Musk drama “is leading to probably insufficient consideration on these election-related points.” 

Twitter’s civic integrity staff, underneath Perez earlier than he stop in September, labored to sluggish the unfold of disinformation and misinformation—with the primary aim of defending the general public dialog on the service about civic processes. As of Friday, Perez mentioned he didn’t understand how lots of the staff’s greater than 100 members stored their positions. 

Reducing the corporate’s employees by half, days earlier than midterms, could depart too few folks to do the “very advanced work” wanted forward of elections—and that it’s onerous to think about that the layoffs gained’t have a “materials affect,” he mentioned.  

“It’s not totally clear to me—notably within the political context—that Elon Musk totally understands the diploma of social accountability that rests on his shoulders, and the very actual hurt, political hurt, political violence, and division that may come from social media platforms,” Perez mentioned. 

After the job cuts, he’s uncertain there are sufficient folks left to investigate what Twitter’s machine learning-based policing system is detecting, if these fashions will work to determine dangerous phrases in posts, or if they’ll flag questionable content material. 

“I don’t know the reply to all of that,” he mentioned. “Nevertheless it definitely doesn’t look good once you’re reducing 50 p.c of very gifted staff,” he mentioned.

Perez added that the issue with the employees cuts prolong far past election day on Nov. 8. 

“It’s a very, very difficult and sophisticated downside to attempt to mitigate the dangerous results of all that disinformation,” Perez mentioned. “And I can’t consider a worse time for Elon Musk to chop off Twitter’s assets on the knees.”

As for Musk, on Monday, he gave his nearly-115 million Twitter followers his advice about which political celebration to vote for.  

“Shared energy curbs the worst excesses of each events, due to this fact I like to recommend voting for a Republican Congress, on condition that the Presidency is Democratic,” he said, addressing “independent-minded voters.”

Twitter didn’t instantly reply to Fortune’s request for remark.

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