Samizdata

Today’s Guardian warns:

Twitter’s mass layoffs, days before US midterms, could be a misinformation disaster

Internal chaos at the company – and the decimation of its staff – has created ideal conditions for falsehoods and hateful content.

The mass layoffs at Twitter, that diminished several teams, including staff on the company’s safety and misinformation teams, could spell disaster during the US midterms elections next week, experts have warned.

What would the woke do without experts – for example Paul Barrett, described as “an expert in disinformation and fake news at New York University”. I’m sure he’s very committed to it, but as to being expert at it – well, judge for yourselves. The Guardian quotes Paul as saying Twitter’s “chaos”, and:

“lack of staff and resources dedicated to counteracting misinformation, has created ideal conditions for election misinformation to thrive … Twitter is in the midst of a category 5 hurricane, and that is not a good environment for fostering vigilance when dealing with inevitable attempts to spread falsehoods and hateful content.”

Yesterday’s Independent shared Paul’s concern. The headline

Man arrested on suspicion of tampering with voting machine

did not prepare me for reading that their concern about this Colorado man was not that he might have affected the June primary but that

it heightened concerns among election officials and security experts that conspiracy theories related to the 2020 presidential election could inspire some voters to meddle with – or even to sabotage – election equipment

Oh, those wicked election deniers! If only they had not raised the idea that such things had already happened, that registered Democrat would never have thought of inserting a thumb drive into a voting machine.

Despite this ingenious framing, I suspect what these ‘experts’ find really hateful is that the ‘information’ they’ve been supplying for two years seems to be missing its target anyway. A recent poll says that 40% agree, and only 36% disagree, that the 2020 presidential election was stolen – and of the 36%, one in three find it “understandable” that others might believe it was, which was not at all the idea meant to be conveyed by always putting ‘baseless’ before ‘claims of election fraud’. (And when the Rasmussen poll a month ago had the don’t-knows choose which side they thought more likely, they did not at all split the way the experts thought they should.) So if that happened despite all those safety and misinformation staffers banning tweets and accounts here, there and everywhere, how safe will the narrative be (I can understand the experts worrying) if Twitter lets reports of vote fraud be seen and assessed by the community, not just the experts?

So much for their fears, now a word about mine. The worst thing about vote fraud is not that it is lied about but that it happens. How much vote fraud will there be in the mid-terms? (Given the conveniently long lead-in times, how much has there already been?) My expectation is: a lot. My hope is: not enough. Hope is not a strategy. This article on the election integrity movement (h/t instapundit) notes some successes but concedes other failures:

Even with the recent Pennsylvania Supreme Court victory, that state remains essentially lawless when it comes to election integrity.

– and IIUC, the counting of post-dated or undated ballots in Pennsylvania only got prevented because a judge recently died, leading to an even-numbers stand-off in a key case.

But I can see it will be inconvenient to the lawless if Twitter hasn’t the censors or the will to bring a halt to users showing poll-watching being prevented. No wonder the Guardian and the Independent are upset.