EU Officials Mislead Public About Dangerous Content on X
“Back in the day, #BlueChecks used to mean trustworthy sources of information,” shared Thierry Breton, European Union (EU) Commissioner on X. “Now with X, our preliminary view is that they deceive users [and] violate the DSA. X has now the right of defense —but if our view is confirmed, we will impose fines & require significant changes.” This follows after last September when European Commission Vice President Vera Jourova argued “[X is] the platform with the largest ratio of mis- or disinformation posts,” citing an EU-commissioned report that concluded “Twitter has the highest discoverability [of disinformation]” to warn of Kremlin-related disinformation. After the report was published, PBS, the Guardian, Forbes, The Verge, Defense One, BBC, DW, Tech Crunch, CNN and more all repeated X is the biggest source of disinformation in the media landscape.
However, there is little evidence to suggest X spreads disinformation at a unique rate compared to other platforms, at least none provided in the report commissioned by and repeatedly cited by the EU. Firstly, the report vaguely defines disinformation, which includes “dubious” content defined as media “that raises significant doubts about its accuracy, truthfulness, or credibility. It implies that the information is questionable or suspicious and may not be trustworthy, potentially containing elements of misinformation or disinformation.”
Further, the researchers admit their study “ideally require[s] collecting random samples of all content and accounts on platforms,” however the study “took a different sampling approach due to a lack of access to internal platform data,” with researchers electing to “search for specific keywords related to current mis/disinformation topics on each platform’s native search engine, and collect the posts and accounts from the search results.” Therefore the data “does not represent a random sample of all content and accounts on that platform, but instead represents the content and accounts encountered by users of the platform who are searching for keywords related to mis/disinformation topics” determined by the EU. This includes “claims in critical topics such as elections, politics, COVID-19, and the Russo-Ukrainian war.” The study’s methodology ultimately measures how effective each platform search engine is at generating results related to the researcher’s specific queries rather than user engagement happening on the platforms.
What’s more, Elon Musk recently alleged, “The European Commission offered X an illegal secret deal: if we quietly censored speech without telling anyone, they would not fine us. The other platforms accepted that deal. X did not.”
Additional details will emerge as X and the European Commission battle the issue in court, though evidence suggests European officials have routinely cited Elon Musk as a direct adversary without demonstrating how X poses a unique threat to the media landscape.
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