According to a study conducted by the European Commission, Elon Musk’s takeover of the social network Twitter played a major role in Russia’s propaganda about Ukraine reaching more people than before the start of the war. The study found that, despite the commitment of the largest social networks, especially “Meta”, volunteers to fight against Russian propaganda, Russian disinformation against Ukraine continues to flourish and thrive.
/nginx/o/2023/09/02/15565488t1h758f.jpg "AbroadYesterday, 16:462 EU: Mask's policy on the social network \"Twitter\" has contributed to the growth of Russian propaganda 2")
According to a study conducted by the European Commission, Elon Musk’s takeover of the social network Twitter played a major role in Russia’s propaganda about Ukraine reaching more people than before the start of the war. The study found that, despite the commitment of the largest social networks, especially “Meta”, volunteers to fight against Russian propaganda, Russian disinformation against Ukraine continues to flourish and flourish.
Allowing the unfettered spread of misinformation and hate speech would have breached the Digital Services Act – the EU’s social media law – had it come into force last year, a year-long study has found.
“The audience and reach of Kremlin-oriented social media accounts increased significantly across Europe in 2022,” the study said.
“Preliminary analysis shows that in the first half of 2023, the reach and influence of Kremlin-backed accounts increased even more, especially due to the collapse of Twitter’s security standards,” the experts add.
The EU has adopted a much more aggressive regulatory approach to government-sponsored disinformation than the US.
The Digital Services Act, which entered into force on August 25 for major social media platforms, requires them to assess the risk of spreading false information, prevent the spread of false information, prevent the worst information from being promoted by algorithms and audit the performance of these algorithms.
The study was conducted by the non-profit think tank “Reset”, which advocates greater monitoring of digital platforms.
Without full access to the data held by the companies — data that should be more accessible under the new law — Reset relied on publicly available information, such as the number of interactions with the problematic content from people who did not follow the account that originally posted it.
The study found that Mask X (formerly Twitter) was not the only company that failed to stop the spread of Russian propaganda. Criticism was also directed at “Instagram”, “Telegram” and “Facebook”.
We remind you that previously European Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton met with “Meta” owner Mark Zuckerberg and “Twitter” owner Elon Musk, who bought the social network last year.
It is Twitter that has attracted the most attention, as its new owner has changed many of the rules on content regulation, including ignoring new EU rules.
Earlier, after threatening to block the social network, Musk agreed to subject Twitter to a Digital Services Act “stress test” to see if the platform met EU standards, although the results of the test were not made public.
