Enlarge this image Twitter in San Francisco. The social media company has laid off thousands of workers and contractors, including many involved in determining whether material on the site broke the site's policies or violated U.S. or foreign laws. David Odisho/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption False information is everywhere. 'Pre-bunking' tries to head it off early The initial round of layoffs also eliminated Twitter's entire curation team of about 150 people. They played an important role adding context and descriptions to news and events trending on the platform, and curating collections of tweets from authoritative sources to help address misleading or false claims. It's unclear how many of the contractors eliminated last weekend were content moderators. Twitter didn't respond to questions about details of the job cuts. But losing even a portion of that workforce would be a blow. Ingle said their work is critical to improving the algorithms she wrote, and to understanding things computers can't, like sarcasm and parody. Sponsor Message Automated systems "need constant input and updating and testing and tweaking, just like any other computer script would need...If there's not enough people to update the algorithms, they become more and more porous," she said. "Automation is a lofty goal, and it's a great goal. But we're just not there yet." Global implications Cutting back on content moderation could also land Musk in hot water with European regulators. German law, for example, requires social networks to quickly remove illegal content or face fines. "Either you have content moderation, or you don't have it," said Sarah Roberts, an information studies professor at UCLA who briefly worked at Twitter earlier this year. "You don't just kind of have content moderation. Removing child sexual exploitation material is content moderation." Ingle is also worried about the worldwide implications as big events loom, from the World Cup, which starts on Saturday, to elections around the globe. "We get hyper fixated in the U.S. on the U.S. elections, but we dealt with the recent Brazilian elections and we dealt with elections all over the world: Japan, India, the E.U., U.K.," she said. "If this global decline in Twitter happens, it's definitely going to affect democracies around the world."