X, formerly known as Twitter, has removed a tool that allowed users to report electoral fake news – except in the European Union, according to Australian researchers.
The move will likely further throw into jeopardy X’s ambitions to woo back advertisers after revealing that it had lost up to 50% of its advertising revenue since Elon Musk’s takeover.
Coming as Australia gears up for a referendum, the Antipodean government has claimed that the levels of electoral misinformation it has seen are the ‘worst yet’.
Users are however still able to report posts that they believe to be hateful, abusive or spam – although it isn’t clear how the scrapping of this tool will impact the highly fraught US political landscape ahead of a rapidly approaching presidential election.
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Alarmingly, the study found that X had the largest “ratio of discoverability” of disinformation when compared to rival platforms Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok and YouTube.
“My message for X is: you have to comply with the hard law. We’ll be watching what you’re doing,” the EU’s values and transparency commissioner, Vera Jourova said following the study’s publication. Social media platforms are required by law to comply with the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which safeguards against election interference.
In any case, this will almost certainly delay the long-hoped for mass return of advertisers to X – which has taken a variety of steps to counter their departure in recent months, including a tool to control the kind of content alongside which a firm’s ads can be placed.
The platform was also strongly criticised last month for taking legal action against an anti-hate speech campaign group, whose research into X’s lax controls had directly led to multiple advertisers pulling out.
