Byron Kaye
Tue, September 26, 2023
SYDNEY (Reuters) - Elon Musk's X, formerly called Twitter, disabled a feature that let users report misinformation about elections, a research organisation said on Wednesday, throwing fresh concern about false claims spreading just before major U.S. and Australian votes.
After introducing a feature in 2022 for users to report a post they considered misleading about politics, X in the past week removed the "politics" category from its drop-down menu in every jurisdiction but the European Union, said the researcher Reset.Tech Australia.
Users could still report posts to X globally for a host of other complaints such as promoting violence or hate speech, the researcher added.
X was not immediately available for comment.
Removing a way for people to report suspected political misinformation may limit intervention at a time when social media platforms are under pressure to curtail falsehoods about electoral integrity, which have grown rapidly in recent years.
It comes less than three weeks before Australia holds a referendum, its first in a quarter century, on whether to change the constitution to establish an Indigenous advisory body to parliament and 14 months before a U.S. presidential election.
"It would be helpful to understand why X have seemingly gone backwards on their commitments to mitigating the kind of serious misinformation that has translated into real political instability in the US, especially on the eve of the 'bumper year' of elections globally," said Alice Dawkins, executive director of Reset.Tech Australia.
In a letter to X's managing director for Australia, Angus Keene, Reset.Tech Australia said the change may leave content that violates X's own policy banning electoral misinformation online without an appropriate review process.
"It is extremely concerning that Australians would lose the ability to report serious misinformation weeks away from a major referendum," said the letter which was published online.
Since billionaire Musk took Twitter, as it was then known, private in late 2022, the company, which cut most of its workforce, has been accused of allowing the proliferation of antisemitism, hate speech and misinformation.
As previously reported by Reuters, Reset.Tech Australia found X failed to remove or label a single post containing misinformation about the Australian referendum over a three-week period, including after it was reported using the now-disabled feature.
Musk has said X's "Community Notes" feature, which allows users to comment on posts to flag false or misleading content, is a better way of fact checking. But those notes are only made public when they are rated as helpful by a range of contributors with varying points of view, according to X's website.
Australia's internet safety regulator wrote to X in June demanding an explanation for an explosion in hate speech on the platform, noting it had reinstated some 62,000 high profile accounts of individuals who espouse Nazi rhetoric.
The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC), which will oversee the Oct. 14 referendum, has said the spread of electoral misinformation is the worst it has seen.
The commission said it was still able to report posts containing political misinformation directly to X, even after the feature was disabled. For other users, the AEC was "available for people to ask questions or seek information".
(Reporting by Byron Kaye; Editing by Sonali Paul)
X outstripped many of its larger peers in the amount of disinformation on its platform.
Karissa Bell
Senior Editor
Tue, September 26, 2023
X, the company previously known as Twitter, could soon find itself in hot water with European Union officials due to the amount of misinformation on its platform. The platform has an outsize role in the spread of misinformation, according to a new EU report.
The EU shared its findings in its first report on platforms’ handling of mis and disinformation as part of the Digital Services Act. The sweeping law, which recently went into effect, requires major platforms to disclose details about their handling of misinformation. Dozens of companies have additionally agreed to a voluntary “Code of Practice” on disinformation. X announced in May that it was pulling out of the agreement, though the company said it would adhere to the stricter disinformation policies required under the DSA.
The report found that X outstripped many of its larger peers when it comes to the volume of disinformation on its platform, and the engagement such posts attract. “X … is the platform with the largest ratio of mis/disinformation posts,” European Commission Vice President Vera Jourova said in a statement. The report also found that X ranked the highest in discoverability of misinformation and disinformation, followed by Facebook and Instagram.
X didn’t respond to a request for comment. In a series of tweets from its Global Affairs account, the company disputed the “framing” of the data and said it remains “committed to complying with the DSA.”
In a statement, Jourova said that all of the major platforms need to “to adjust their actions to reflect that there is a war in the information space waged against us.” She said that upcoming elections within the EU “will be an important test for the Code that platforms signatories should not fail.”
She also said that Musk would not be “off the hook” just because Twitter pulled out of the code of practice, according to comments reported by The Guardian. “My message for Twitter/X is you have to comply. We will be watching what you do.”
EU Faults Musk’s X Over Russian Disinformation
Bloomberg News
Tue, September 26, 2023
(Bloomberg) -- Elon Musk’s X was cited as the biggest outlet for Russian disinformation as European Commission Vice President Vera Jourova warned of Slovakia being targeted by pro-Kremlin narratives ahead of an election Saturday.
The European Union’s chief trade negotiator, Valdis Dombrovskis, also issued some of the bloc’s strongest criticism yet on China’s failure to condemn Russia’s war in Ukraine, saying it was damaging Beijing’s investment opportunities.
Senate Democratic and Republican leaders in Washington agreed Tuesday on a plan to keep the government open through mid-November and provide $6 billion in assistance to Ukraine. The stopgap measure to avert an Oct. 1 shutdown still would have to overcome gridlock in the Republican-controlled House.
The Senate’s stopgap measure to avert an Oct. 1 shutdown still would have to overcome gridlock in the Republican-controlled House and a federal funding lapse remains likely.
In Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy discussed increasing the production of drones during a meeting with military commanders and officials. Ukrainian authorities reopened operations that had been suspended at a Danube River border checkpoint with Romania after a Russian drone strike damaged port facilities in the region overnight.
Russia is still relying on European shipping to transport its oil even as the country’s supplies exceed Group-of-Seven price caps, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. Roughly two-thirds of Russian crude and petroleum products is being transported by vessels insured or owned in nations implementing price caps imposed by the G-7 and its allies, the Helsinki-based researcher said.
Report: Engagement with Foreign Propaganda is Soaring on Elon Musk's X
Lucas Ropek
Tue, September 26, 2023
Once upon a time, Twitter (now renamed X) routinely tried to label what it deemed “state affiliated” news sites, in an effort to highlight potential government disinformation and propaganda. After Elon Musk took over the platform late last year, however, he decided to put the kibosh on that policy. Predictably, new research shows that, since Musk did away with the site’s media labeling, user engagement with foreign propaganda has exploded.
A new report from NewsGuard, which analyzes media trends, claims that sites like Russia’s RT and TASS, China Daily, and Iran’s PressTV, have seen huge upticks in user engagement over the last several months. Indeed, the report claims that, in the 90 days that followed the removal of X’s “state affiliated” labels, engagement with posts from the English-language versions of their accounts shot up by some 70 percent.
Foreign propaganda is getting boosted by X’s algorithm, researchers claim
Why, exactly, are users engaging with this kind of content so much more frequently? Well, according to NewsGuard’s report, X’s own algorithm appears to be amplifying the content, thus creating a larger audience for it. Prior to Musk’s takeover, Twitter claimed that content from “state affiliated” media could never be boosted by its algorithm. However, NewsGuard says that, since Musk’s takeover, stories from sites like RT and China Daily are “algorithmically recommended” in users’ “For You” feeds with some regularity. Previous research has highlighted this trend, showing that Musk’s changes have allowed foreign disinformation campaigns to gain increasing visibility.
Jack Brewster, an analyst with NewsGuard, told Gizmodo it’s clear that, under Musk, “X now gives readers much less information about the sources from which they’re getting their news” and that the site’s recently tweaked information filtering processes have clearly “had a substantial effect on how disinformation spreads on the platform.”
Musk’s changes have made an already complex informational landscape that much more confusing
Of course, it’s important to note that Twitter/X’s disinformation problem did not begin with Elon Musk. The platform has always been a cess pool of propaganda and much of that propaganda does not originate via news organizations—state affiliated or otherwise. Armies of bots and trolls, weaponized by government agencies, political operatives, celebrities, and shadowy contractors, are routinely used to manipulate the flow of information on the site. It also recently came to light that, in the years prior to the rollout of the “state affiliated” media labels, Twitter blatantly helped amplify the U.S.’s own propaganda efforts in the Middle East, meaning that it could hardly be called a neutral arbiter of information during that period.
Twitter’s media labeling policy—which Musk did away with—was also a mess. Notably, the platform labeled state-affiliated news organizations run by America’s geopolitical foes (China, Russia, and Iran), but did not dole out similar labels for Western media outlets. Radio Free Europe, the government funded news organization that, during the height of the Cold War, received significant covert funds and programmatic direction from the CIA, and which continues to be financed by the government, was never given the same treatment as RT or China Daily. Voice of America, an openly state-owned news network, was also never labeled until Musk showed up. These U.S. organizations have claimed that their editorial policies make them different than foreign state media organizations.
Brewster readily acknowledges that the pre-Musk labeling policy had some problems, though he notes that the recent changes have clearly dispensed with important guardrails that, no matter how flimsy, were designed to combat a certain amount of information pollution on the platform.
“I don’t think Twitter before Musk did things perfectly,” said Brewster. “But I think we should always be trying to think of new ways to give people more information instead of less—especially on social media platforms, where the accountability and transparency is usually next to none. I think these platforms—the internet, overall—were not really built to spread information in a responsible way. Instead of getting better, though, this situation seems to be getting worse.”
Gizmodo
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