While Twitter has always struggled with combating misinformation about major news events, it was still the go-to place to find out what’s happening in the world. But the Israel-Hamas war has underscored how the platform now transformed into X has become not only unreliable but is actively promoting falsehoods.
And the European Union’s digital enforcer wrote to Musk about misinformation and “potentially illegal content” on X, in what’s shaping up to be one of the first major tests for the 27-nation bloc’s new digital rules aimed at cleaning up social media platforms. The liberal advocacy group Media Matters found that since Saturday, subscribers to X’s premium service shared at least six misleading videos about the war. This included out-of-context videos and old ones purporting to be recent — that earned millions of views.
Emerging platforms, meanwhile, are still finding their footing in the global information ecosystem, so while they might not yet be targets for large-scale disinformation campaigns, they also don’t have the sway of larger, more established rivals. “Every time there is some major event and information is at a premium, we see misinformation spread like wildfire,” Pennycook said. “There is now a very consistent pattern, but every time it happens there’s a sudden surge of concern about misinformation that tends to fade away once the moment passes.”