Inside Job, Con't

Some 44% of Americans believe the federal government is controlled by a secret cabal, in a result that was inevitable thanks to decades of conspiracy theories, and oh yeah, rampant antisemitism.

Joel Benenson, the renowned pollster for President Obama's 2008 and 2012 campaigns, gave a first look at the results of a question he'd never asked before: "We wanted to test QAnon's language that the world is controlled by a secret cabal."

What he found: 44% of registered voters said they believe it."Given that the U.S. is the world's strongest democracy, we wanted to see how far the appeal of language like that might reach," Benenson said.

The figure is especially arresting because of this result in the same poll:59% of voters agree that the U.S. is a strong democracy.

The breakdown: 66% of Democrats ... 55% of Republicans ... 54% of independents.

 

Which is weird because that means there are people who believe we're controlled by a secret cabal AND we're a "strong democracy". The growing evidence is that neither is actually true. 

Meanwhile, Elon Musk just laid off half of Twitter, including basically all of the people working to fight misinformation on the platform.

Mass layoffs at Twitter on Friday battered the teams primarily responsible for keeping the platform free of misinformation, potentially hobbling the company’s capabilities four days before the end of voting in Tuesday’s midterm elections, one current and six former Twitter employees familiar with the cuts told NBC News, five of whom had been recently laid off.

Two former Twitter employees and one current employee warned the layoffs could bring chaos around the elections, as they hit especially hard on teams responsible for the curation of trending topics and for the engineering side of “user health,” which works on content moderation and site integrity. The seven people asked to withhold their names out of worry over professional retribution and because they weren’t authorized to speak for the company.

CEO Elon Musk, who’s facing sizable future debt payments and declining revenue at Twitter, said the cuts were needed to ensure the health of the company’s long-term finances a week after he bought it for $44 billion.

The cuts appeared to affect many people whose jobs were to keep Twitter from becoming overwhelmed by prohibited content, such as hateful conduct and targeted harassment, the seven sources said.

Twitter has not announced any moderation policy changes, and earlier this week, Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of safety and integrity, said the company was remaining vigilant against attempts to manipulate conversations about the midterms. Musk has said the company won’t allow anyone back on Twitter who had been previously banned for at least a few more weeks.

But Gita Johar, a Columbia University business professor who has studied misinformation on Twitter, said the job cuts risk turning the site into a “free-for-all with rumors, conspiracy theories and falsehoods taking hold on the platform and in people’s imagination.”

 

The fact that Musk is doing this just days before the midterm elections is being done on purpose, when the GOP rumors of "election fraud" fly rampant on Tuesday and well into the future, Twitter will be ground zero.

Vote if you haven't already. Even Kentucky has early voting this weekend.