Below: Elon Musk begins Twitter’s mass layoffs, and the FCC plans to open up a new bureau. First:
Voters may overestimate how well they spot junk news, study suggests
A majority of Americans say they are concerned that voters will base their decisions in the upcoming midterm elections based on false or misleading information, but only a fraction of them think it will happen to them, according to a new Knight Foundation and Ipsos poll.
Researchers say the findings suggest that while Americans are now widely grappling with the potential threats posed by online disinformation in U.S. elections, they may be overconfident in their ability to thwart it individually.
According to the study, 61 percent of those surveyed are “somewhat” or “very” concerned that people in their community will make a decision on how to vote based on misleading information they see on social media, while 58 percent think people will be fooled by phony news.
But when asked about their own chances of being swayed or tricked by false or misleading information, the percentage of respondents who voiced concern dropped to 1 in 4.
“We all seem to be overestimating our abilities to navigate a fractured media landscape right now, and to me that should be a big concern,” said John Sands, senior director for media and democracy at the Knight Foundation.
He added, “To me, it almost says more about the respondents than it does about the respondents’ friends and neighbors.”
Researchers also found a “high level of agreement” within the public that false election information on social media poses a problem, including among a majority of both Democrats and Republicans.
Seventy-six percent of Americans said they think false election information is a problem; 88 percent of Democrats, 71 percent of Republicans and 70 percent of independents concurred.
“This election cycle, it seems like Americans have connected the dots between the quality of the information they consume online and the resilience of our democracy,” Sands said. “To me, that’s something that jumps off the page — that people recognize the dangers to democracy posed by harmful content online.”
But partisan differences were more pronounced when respondents were asked what specific types of election disinformation should be restricted.
While a significant majority of Democrats and Republicans said tech companies should restrict blatant attempts to mislead voters, including by providing incorrect balloting information, support among Republicans was more muted for restricting unsubstantiated election fraud claims or content that “influences how someone perceives their safety on election day.”
Eighty-nine percent of Democrats said social media should restrict unfounded election fraud claims, and 76 percent said the platforms should limit content related to election safety, while support for such restrictions among Republicans was 54 percent and 49 percent, respectively.
“This to me tracks with some of our previous polling … which shows that Republicans, while they’re still concerned about these issues, they don’t exhibit the same degree of concern or same urgency of concern around them as Democrats,” Sands said.
One area Americans largely agreed on: The government should stay away from regulating social media with the aim of minimizing election misinformation.
According to the survey, only 1 in 3 people said they favored government regulation of social media companies to curb election misinformation, while higher rates of respondents — 50 percent and 49 percent, respectively — called for individuals to take on more personal responsibility for the spread of misinformation and for companies to more aggressively police false content.
The poll was conducted from Oct. 14 to 16 and surveyed 1,024 Americans 18 and older.
Musk begins layoffs at Twitter
Twitter told employees about the impending layoffs in a Thursday email that came after new owner Elon Musk and his deputies conducted a week-long review of the company, Faiz Siddiqui reports. The layoffs are expected to affect teams across Twitter.
- “Team, In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday,” the email said. “We recognize that this will impact a number of individuals who have made valuable contributions to Twitter, but this action is unfortunately necessary to ensure the company’s success moving forward.”
- Twitter told employees it would let them know if they’re affected by noon Eastern time today.
Twitter employees first found out about the scale of impending layoffs by looking at chat and calendar tools to get clues about what is happening at the company and communicating on an anonymous workplace gossip site, Will Oremus reports. The email about layoffs was the first communication from the new leadership of the company to employees, Will reports.
Meanwhile, major companies continue to pause their ads on the platform. General Mills, Mondelez International, Pfizer and Audi have temporarily paused their advertising, the Wall Street Journal’s Suzanne Vranica and Patience Haggin report. Musk has promised advertisers that Twitter won’t become a “free-for-all hellscape,” but his recent amplification of a conspiracy theory raised doubts among ad executives, my colleague Gerrit De Vynck reported this week.
Tech firms announce hiring slowdowns and layoffs
Amazon is pausing new incremental corporate hiring while tech companies Lyft and Stripe said they would cut 13 percent and 14 percent of their workforces, adding up to around 1,700 people, the New York Times’s Kalley Huang reports.
“Tech giants including Meta and Amazon have been slowing down their hiring for months, while smaller tech companies such as Robinhood and Coinbase have announced layoffs,” Huang writes. “But rarely have so many job cuts and hiring freezes in the industry been disclosed on the same day.”
The FCC plans to open a space bureau
The Federal Communications Commission plans to reorganize its international bureau so the commission can have a new space bureau and an office of international affairs, Reuters’s David Shepardson reports. It comes as regulators work to keep up with the growth of the satellite industry.
“The satellite industry is growing at a record pace, but here on the ground our regulatory frameworks for licensing them have not kept up,” FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said. “A new Space Age is here. Unlike the first Space Age, this one is not limited to the prowess of our political superpowers.”
- The American Enterprise Institute hosts an event on online election disinformation today at 10 a.m.
