The cuts appeared to affect many people whose jobs were to keep Twitter from becoming overwhelmed by prohibited content, such as hateful conduct and targeted harassment, the seven sources said.

Twitter has not announced any moderation policy changes, and earlier this week, Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of safety and integrity, said the company was remaining vigilant against attempts to manipulate conversations about the midterms. Musk has said the company won’t allow anyone back on Twitter who had been previously banned for at least a few more weeks.

But Gita Johar, a Columbia University business professor who has studied misinformation on Twitter, said the job cuts risk turning the site into a “free-for-all with rumors, conspiracy theories and falsehoods taking hold on the platform and in people’s imagination.”

Twitter had not released public figures about which teams had been cut the most, but the layoffs were widespread. In an exchange at an investor conference Friday, Musk appeared to confirm that his team had laid off half the company’s workforce, according to CNBC.

“Elon will own a company without employees,” a source inside Twitter told CNBC.

An email to Twitter’s public relations team was not immediately returned Friday. Some members of the team tweeted that they had been laid off.

Roth, Twitter’s head of safety and integrity, tweeted early Friday evening: "While we said goodbye to incredibly talented friends and colleagues yesterday, our core moderation capabilities remain in place."

He added that layoffs affected about 15% of the company's trust and safety teams with "front-line moderation staff experiencing the least impact."

"With early voting underway in the US, our efforts on election integrity — including harmful misinformation that can suppress the vote and combatting state-backed information operations — remain a top priority," he continued.

Musk retweeted Roth's thread and added: "Again, to be crystal clear, Twitter’s strong commitment to content moderation remains absolutely unchanged."

He also tweeted that "hateful speech at times this week decline *below* our prior norms, contrary to what you may read in the press."

Twitter’s curation team, which had a variety of roles across the platform, including coordinating the detection and publishing of moments meant to debunk misinformation, appears to be gone, one source said. The team had recently published an explainer about how it tried to keep information accurate and impartial.

Andrew Haigh, a London-based curation lead, said on Twitter that the team “is no more.”

“Unfortunately, the platform’s history of transparency and supporting research may be just that: history,” said Kate Starbird, a professor of design and engineering at the University of Washington who studies misinformation.

Starbird said it remained to be seen how potential misinformation around the midterms might be affected.

“We were already expecting a surge in rumors and disinformation around the election, even before Musk taking the reins,” she said.

“But the mass layoffs mean that we’ll get to see what an unmoderated major platform truly looks like in 2022, in an era of algorithmic manipulation and networked toxicity, during a massive online convergence event with huge political stakes.”

The roughly 100-person team tasked with Twitter Blue, the site’s subscription service, was also slashed, according to one former employee. Most of the team’s engineers and product managers were fired on Friday and replaced with a “rag tag team” from other parts of the company, that would build the service into a vehicle for verification, the employee said.