Rumor: Meta has downsized team to protect elections

Meta is rumored to have reduced the team that focuses on protecting the integrity of elections on Facebook, for example, from 300 to 60 people. That reports The New York Times.

In addition to the 60 people, there are a few other employees who focus on other projects within Meta in addition to elections, The New York Times reports citing people familiar with Meta’s internal organization. According to the newspaper’s sources the team also no longer reports directly to CEO Mark Zuckerberg on a weekly basis, as before, but to communications chief Nick Clegg. Zuckerberg would be kept informed of the work of the team.

Meta denies that it concerns 60 people and speaks of hundreds of people in multiple teams who are said to be working on elections. A spokesperson said: “We have had a comprehensive approach to elections on our platforms since the US election of 2020 and to the dozen elections worldwide thereafter.”

NYT links the alleged downsizing of the election team with Zuckerberg’s focus on reorganizing his company around the metaverse. In the run-up to the 2020 US presidential election, Zuckerberg called ensuring the integrity of elections the top priority. Among other things, the platform tightened the rules around political advertisements and made efforts to fight fake news to influence elections by deleting hundreds of thousands of messages. Those actions came in part after it emerged that large numbers of Russian state-affiliated accounts tried to influence the 2016 US election with fake messages. Since last year, Facebook has allowed political ads in the US again.