After Elon Musk fired roughly half of Twitter's employees just days before the midterm elections, the social media platform is struggling to deal with political misinformation and other harmful posts. According to those who survived the cuts and an outside voting rights group, Twitter is struggling to respond.

The recent mass layoffs spared many of the people whose job it is to keep hate and misinformation off the social-media platform.

But in preparation for the layoffs, employees said the company also sharply reduced how many employees can look into a specific account’s digital history and behaviour — a practice necessary to investigate if it’s been used maliciously and take action to suspend it. The company said it froze access to those tools to reduce “insider risk” at a time of transition.

But in preparation for the layoffs, employees said the company also sharply reduced how many employees can look into a specific account’s digital history and behaviour — a practice necessary to investigate if it’s been used maliciously and take action to suspend it

The developments are causing concern as the U.S. midterm elections culminate on Tuesday. Though millions of Americans have already cast early and absentee ballots, millions more are expected to go to the polls to cast in-person votes.

Voter safety and security are at risk, and actors seeking to cast doubt on a legitimate winner of an election have concerns about the platform's ability to handle hate speech, misinformation and misinformation that could impact the integrity of the election.

On Friday, researchers tracking misinformation about the midterm elections notified Twitter about three posts from prominent far-right figures debunking claims about election fraud.

Before Musk took over, Twitter responded much more quickly, said Jesse Littlewood, vice president for campaigns at Common Cause. The group said they had been in regular contact with Twitter staff before Musk took over. Now, they are getting a response from a generic email address.

Musk gutted teams working on marketing, communications and editorial curation of what people see on Twitter.

But his decision to retain most of Twitter’s content moderation team came as a welcome surprise to some inside and outside the company.

Two employees who survived the job cuts credit a previously little-known executive Yoel Roth, Twitter’s global head of safety and integrity, for leveraging his team’s importance to Musk’s goals for Twitter while avoiding moves that might anger the mercurial Tesla CEO.

“Yoel Roth singlehandedly saved the company,” said a Twitter employee who spoke on condition of anonymity because of concerns about job security.

Roth has become the public face of Twitter’s content moderation since Musk took over and has regularly defended Twitter’s ongoing efforts to fight harmful misinformation. Musk, a prolific tweeter with more than 110 million followers, has frequently pointed to Roth’s Twitter feed as the most reliable account of the company’s adherence to integrity standards. And the billionaire, who embraces the idea that Twitter’s past leadership suppressed right-wing views, defended Roth when ardent Musk supporters demanded his firing over past comments they thought showed Roth’s liberal bias.

One Twitter employee said Monday that layoff survivors were actively looking for new jobs in part because of Musk’s lack of commitment to keeping the platform free of hate speech and misinformation. Speaking anonymously because of concerns about job security, the employee said the job cuts would make Twitter’s staff less effective in following up and acting on complaints about election-related disinformation because they included people leading civic integrity teams.