Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) is the biggest outlet for peddlers of disinformation, European Union warned urging social media platforms to combat Russia’s “war of ideas.” European Commission Vice President Vera Jourova said platforms need to act ahead of national and European elections next year.
“This is a multi-million euro weapon of mass manipulation aimed both internally at the Russians as well as Europeans and the rest of the world,” Vera Jourova said, adding, “The very large platforms must address this risk. Especially that we have to expect that the Kremlin and others will be active before our European elections.”
“X, former Twitter, who is not under the code any more, is the platform with the largest ratio of mis- or disinformation posts. The pilot also showed that disinformation actors were found to have significantly more followers than their non-disinformation counterparts and tend to have joined the platform more recently than non-disinformation users,” she said.
The European Union released reports on how each of the major tech companies, including Meta’s Facebook, Alphabet’s Google and ByteDance’s TikTok are doing to battle disinformation on the platforms.
Noting several steps taken by platforms to combat Russian influence, European Commission Vice President said that Google terminated more than 400 channels involved in Russian influence operations in the first four months of the year while Meta expanded fact-checking partnerships in 22 languages in the EU.