According to the vice-president of the EU Commission, Věra Jourová, Russia is waging a war of ideas on social media.
Billionaire Elon Musk’s after buying Twitter, the service has become the worst source of disinformation, says the vice-president of the EU Commission responsible for values and transparency Vera Jourová.
The view is based on a report commissioned by the Commission, which monitored disinformation published on six different online services in Poland, Slovakia and Spain for three months.
The end result was that on Twitter, or the current X, the spread of disinformation and the share of publishers spreading disinformation was the highest.
Google, TikTok, Microsoft and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, have signed, among other things, EU disinformation agreements aimed at combating fake news code of conduct.
Twitter, now known as X, was previously among the signatories, but has been reluctant to commit to those rules since Musk bought the service last year.
On Tuesday, Jourová warned Musk that the service he owns cannot avoid responsibility, even though it is not committed to voluntary codes of conduct.
These same rules have been included in the new binding regulation on digital services to the regulatory package.
– We are watching what you do, Jourová warned Musk and his X service on Tuesday.
According to Jourová, disinformation is particularly actively distributed on social media by Russia, which tries to use it to weaken European democracies.
For example, Google has reported that it removed more than 400 channels from YouTube between January and April, which have been related to Russian information influence.
More than 200 videos published in Russian, Belarusian or Ukrainian have been removed from Tiktok as a result of fact checking.
– The Russian state has started a war of ideas to pollute our information space, Jourová said.
Sources: AP, AFP