Brussels was concerned on Tuesday about the rate of disinformation on the social network
The Vice-President of the European Commission, Vera Jourova, highlighted the poor results of X during tests during a press conference. It featured reports provided by major online platforms outlining their efforts against disinformation over a six-month period, under the EU Code of Practice.
This code, launched in 2018, brings together 44 voluntary signatories, giants like Meta (Facebook, WhatsApp), Google (YouTube) or TikTok, but also smaller platforms, as well as advertising professionals, fact-checkers and NGOs.
To measure online disinformation, the signatories created indicators and launched a testing phase in three Member States (Spain, Poland and Slovakia). The test shows that platform
The social network’s owner, Elon Musk, “knows he’s not off the hook just because he left the code of practice,” she said. “You must respect the law, we will monitor what you do,” she told him, referring to the new regulations on digital services (“Digital Services Act”, DSA).
The DSA forces platforms to make efforts against disinformation or face fines of up to 6% of their global turnover.
Jourova called on all platforms to step up the fight against Russian disinformation ahead of national elections in Slovakia and Poland, as well as ahead of the European elections next June. “The Russian state has engaged in a war of ideas to pollute our information space with half-truths and lies to make people believe that democracy is no better than autocracy,” she warned.
In its report, Google highlighted that its video sharing platform YouTube had deactivated 400 channels involved in influence operations linked to the Russian state from January to April.
Meta reported expanding its partnerships from fact-checking to 26 partners to cover 22 languages of the European Union, now including Czech and Slovak.
TikTok announced that it had verified 832 videos related to the war in Ukraine, leading to the removal of 211 of them.
Among the content removed by the platforms, the “Russian narrative” is “very dominant,” explained Vera Jourova. A lot of false information also attacks migrants, the ecological transition of the European Union or sexual minorities (LGBT, etc.), she said.