Twitter's disinformation team had to 'beg' other teams for help because of a lack of tools and staff, a leaked audit says
- Twitter's disinformation experts had to "beg" other teams for help, a leaked audit says.
- The audit found the site integrity team was only "reactive to the crisis of the day."
Twitter's disinformation team reportedly had to "beg" for help from other teams because they lacked the tools and resources they needed, according to a leaked audit.
The audit, which the Washington Post obtained and published in full, stated that the company's site integrity team did not have "the necessary dedicated engineering support" to target widespread disinformation on the platform.
The audit concluded that the lack of resources meant that the team could only be "reactive to the crisis of the day" and prevented the platform from effective "proactive threat detection and mitigation to avoid crises."
Twitter did not immediately respond to Insider's requests for comment.
It comes after the Post and CNN revealed the details of a whistleblower complaint to regulators by Peiter Zatko, Twitter's former head of security. He commissioned the audit in 2021, while still working there.
The Post reported the audit was carried out by disinformation experts, The Alethea Group, who interviewed staff who said Twitter had been slow to act against content promoting conspiracy theories like QAnon and Pizzagate because teams did not know which topic or department they fell under.
The audit also found Twitter had inadvertently accepted a QAnon account into its community-led misinformation project Birdwatch.
The 12 staff members interviewed for the audit also regularly mentioned "under-resourced teams" and "having to borrow resources (such as engineering support)."
The Post reported that they spoke to an unnamed senior official at Twitter, who claimed that the staffing numbers addressed in the audit referred only to senior policy experts and that the company also has dozens of full-time experts and thousand of contractors employed to enforce rules around misinformation.
The audit deemed that in 2021, Twitter had been consistently "behind the curve" in responding to misinformation.