Sources: X shut down a tool for identifying coordinated disinformation campaigns in recent months, as the company moved services off Google Cloud to cut costs

Erin Woo / The Information :

The Information 2023-10-10 Erin Woo

Context & Ripple Effects

This report extends X’s recent retrenchment in platform operations: it followed cuts to the team focused on disinformation and election fraud and earlier layoffs among ad-optimization data staff. Together, those actions indicate that functions once supported by dedicated people and tooling were being reassessed under a cost-focused operating model.

The Google Cloud migration matters because it pairs a reduction in infrastructure spending with the removal of a capability used to detect coordinated campaigns. The result is not merely a vendor change; it narrows the operational stack supporting trust-and-safety work.

First-order effects

X loses a tool for identifying coordinated disinformation campaigns, reducing a specific detection capability as its related integrity workforce is also shrinking.
Moving services off Google Cloud changes X’s infrastructure footprint and reduces Google Cloud’s role in serving those workloads.

Second-order effects

With fewer staff and less specialized tooling, X may need to prioritize which abuse patterns receive investigation, leaving more detection dependent on remaining internal processes.
The combination of cloud migration and integrity cutbacks makes cost discipline more visibly intertwined with moderation capacity, a trade-off advertisers, researchers, and platform partners can scrutinize.

Third-order effects

If comparable cuts persist, platform safety infrastructure could increasingly be managed as a discretionary operating cost rather than a durable product function, making capabilities more vulnerable during budget resets.
The broader risk is an uneven trust-and-safety baseline across large platforms: firms that retain tooling and specialist teams can sustain deeper monitoring, while retrenching peers may offer less visibility into coordinated manipulation.

The trend: This is one data point in a wider platform-efficiency trend in which infrastructure and trust-and-safety spending are being consolidated or cut together.

Discussion

@safety @safety on x
In the past couple of days, we've seen an increase in daily active users on @X in the conflict area, plus there have been more than 50 million posts globally focusing on the weekend's terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas. As the events continue to unfold rapidly, a cross-company..…
@erinkwoo Erin Woo on x
New: Elon Musk's X shut down a tool used to identify misleading media as part of the company's drive to reduce expenses, showing the real-world impacts of Musk's cost-cutting push as organized misinformation now proliferates across X https://www.theinformation.com/ ...
@taliaotg @taliaotg on x
auto-enrolling new accounts into being able to participate in Community Notes, which is something inaccessible to most existing accounts and already rife with spin. what could go wrong.
@chrisharihar Chris Harihar on x
Some questions: 1. How many Hamas-linked accounts were created & were they used to coordinate attacks? 2. What's the volume of terrorist content X is hosting, despite “trying to prevent” it? 3. How many advertisers had ads appear alongside Hamas/terrorist material? [image]
@oalexanderdk Oliver Alexander on x
“X is committed to the safety of our platform and to giving people information as quickly as possible.” All while the owner of this place does nothing but spread misinformation and promote accounts that only care about engagement

Chronicles