Rumor: Meta has significantly downsized team to protect elections

According to rumors, Meta has reduced the team that focuses on protecting the integrity of elections on Facebook, for example, from 300 to 60 people. This is reported by 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 sources of the newspaper 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 team’s work.

Meta denies that it concerns 60 people and speaks of hundreds of people in multiple teams who would be busy with work around elections. A spokesperson said: “We’ve had a comprehensive approach to elections on our platforms since the 2020 U.S. election and to the dozens of elections globally thereafter.”

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