
Flagged and Ignored: Testing X’s Response to EU Sanction Violations
Executive Summary Background Under the current EU sanctions regime against Russia, Russian state media outlets and affiliated figures are banned…
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Executive Summary Background Under the current EU sanctions regime against Russia, Russian state media outlets and affiliated figures are banned…
This report examines the financial infrastructure that enables misinformation in Europe through a broad analysis of advertising and monetization practices across major social media platforms and services offering ads on the open web (Facebook, Twitter/X, YouTube and Google Display Ads).
given the ease with which such illegal content was discovered, Meta, Google, X/Twitter, TikTok and Telegram’s compliance teams should investigate why they seem not to have taken sufficient action to limit access.
While X is presenting the crowd-sourced Community Notes system as a substitute for professional fact-checking, our results show that in a European context, Community Notes (and more broadly, X’s content moderation systems) fail to identify the posts flagged by professional fact-checkers, leaving misleading and oftentimes highly-viral content unaddressed.
it appears that X has left the network almost completely untouched: of the 663 tweets that were online as of the report’s publication on 4 September, 656 were still accessible as of 25 September.
In order to reach its objectives, the influence operation attempts to make use of domestic news or context, often trying to frame the tweets in the context of larger French political debates.
Despite these legal provisions, as of early June 2024, in the week before the European elections, X accounts linked to EU-sanctioned Russian state-controlled media and media personalities remained accessible to EU-based audiences.
Reputable news sources demonstrate transparency in all aspects of their operation. They disclose their sources of funding, identify staff who produce their content and clearly indicate their sources of information. If they commit errors, they openly acknowledge and correct these errors. Our investigation shows Leading Report exhibits none of these characteristics. The two individuals who run the website and its X/Twitter account appear to hold no relevant credentials in health, medicine or journalism.
The increasing number of measures to limit greenhouse gas pollution that can be expected in the future will certainly present opportunities for future weaponization and misrepresentation. Writers, editors, and journalists should be aware of these manipulation tactics when discussing the aftermath of COVID-19 restrictions or future climate policies, knowing that some actors are trawling for any evidence to boost the manufactured ‘climate lockdown’ outrage.
A study of accounts that have repeatedly published popular tweets linking to known misinformation shows that their collective popularity has significantly grown (on average, +42% interactions per tweet) since Elon Musk took effective control of the platform on 27 October 2022. These results appear to run afoul of Twitter’s commitments as a signatory of the EU Code of Practice on Disinformation.