Elon Musk’s X, formerly Twitter, is the biggest source of fake news, primarily from Russia, EU official says
- A EU study of six online platforms in Poland, Slovakia and Spain finds that Twitter has the highest prevalence of disinformation
- Russia’s disinformation operation is a ‘weapon of mass manipulation’, European Commission Vice-President Vera Jourova says
Moscow’s disinformation operation “is a multimillion-euro weapon of mass manipulation aimed both internally at the Russians as well as at Europeans and the rest of the world”, she said at a press briefing in Brussels.
With elections scheduled in Slovakia and Poland in the coming weeks and a bloc-wide vote next year, big online platforms must address the risk of online meddling, she said.
The Kremlin and other malicious actors “will try to use the design features of the platforms to manipulate,” Jourova said.
She was providing an update on the 27-nation EU’s 2022 Code of Practice on Disinformation. Google, TikTok, Microsoft and Facebook and Instagram parent Meta signed up to the voluntary code last year, but Twitter dropped out after Musk bought the platform.