Musk's X is the biggest purveyor of disinformation, EU official says
A top European Union official says the social network X, formerly known as Twitter, is the biggest source of fake news and urged owner Elon Musk to comply with the bloc’s laws aimed at combating disinformation
LONDON — A top European Union official said Tuesday that the social network X, formerly known as Twitter, is the biggest source of fake news and urged owner Elon Musk to comply with the bloc's laws aimed at combating disinformation.
Ahead of upcoming elections, Google, TikTok, Microsoft and Meta also have more to do to tackle disinformation, much of it coming from Russia, which is using social media to wage a “war of ideas" against democracy, European Commission Vice President Vera Jourova said.
Moscow's disinformation operation “is a multimillion-euro weapon of mass manipulation aimed both internally at the Russians as well as at Europeans and the rest of the world,” she said at a press briefing in Brussels.
With elections scheduled in Slovakia and Poland in the coming weeks and a bloc-wide vote next year, big online platforms must address the risk of online meddling, she said.
The Kremlin and other malicious actors “will try to use the design features of the platforms to manipulate,” Jourova said.
She was providing an update on the 27-nation EU's 2022 Code of Practice on Disinformation. Google, TikTok, Microsoft and Facebook and Instagram parent Meta signed up to the voluntary code last year, but Twitter dropped out after Musk bought the platform.
X is “the platform with the largest ratio of mis- or disinformation posts,” Jourova said.
An email to the company's press team seeking comment resulted in an automatically generated reply that said, “Busy now, please check back later.”
The European Commission,
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