The Washington Post reports that lax content moderation on X (aka Twitter) has led to social media companies and law enforcement efforts to quash “propaganda accounts controlled by foreign groups aimed at influencing U.S. politics.” It was reported that there was confusion in the coordinated efforts between the agencies.
Propaganda is now “rampant” on X, the paper said, and other social media companies are stuck in a never-ending cycle where some of the propaganda they block proliferates on X and then He said he is watching it inevitably spread to his own platforms.
Meta, Google, and then Twitter Inc. were targeted by law enforcement and other companies after a Russian-backed influence campaign manipulated their platforms in an attempt to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. We have begun coordinating removal efforts with disinformation researchers.
The following year, all three companies pledged to Congress that they would work vigorously to stop Russian-backed propaganda from spreading on their platforms. The two companies have begun meeting biweekly to create clear election disinformation policies and compare notes on the propaganda networks each platform has exposed, according to Post interviews with anonymous sources who attended those meetings. Ta.
However, his company withdrew from the partnership in May 2023 after Elon Musk acquired Twitter and rebranded it as X.
Sources told The Post that the last attendee at the It is said that he received Then, when Musk fired his entire election integrity team last September, Rodericks was fired, and after that, Mr. told.
In 2023, for example, Meta flagged 150 “human influence accounts” identified on the platform, of which “136 were still on X as of Thursday night,” according to an analysis by the Post. “I was doing it,” he said. Company X’s oversight affected all but eight of the 123 “China-based deceptive campaigns” related to accounts reported by Meta in May, August, and December last year. The Post reported.
The paper’s report also provides exclusive analysis from the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), which found that 86 propaganda accounts Meta reported last November “are still active on X. “It has been found.
The majority of these accounts (81) were China-based accounts posing as Americans, SIO reported. These accounts frequently rip photos from Americans’ LinkedIn profiles and change the names of real Americans to cover Chinese and American politics, as well as people who frequently trend on X, such as Musk and Joe Biden. I was posting about.
Meta has warned that China-based influence campaigns are “proliferating,” but X’s standards still appear too lax, the Post said. Even accounts related to criminal investigations remain active on X. The Post reports that one “account allegedly run by China’s Ministry of Public Security” remains on X even though its posts were cited by U.S. prosecutors in a criminal complaint. That’s what it means.
Prosecutors linked the account to “dozens” of X accounts that seek to “shape public perceptions” of the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese government, and other world leaders. These accounts also comment on hot topics such as fentanyl and police brutality, and appear to convey “disappointment with the current state of America without any clear partisanship,” said the London nonprofit. said Elise Thomas, an analyst at the Institute. Strategic dialogue, he told the Post.
Some of the X accounts flagged by The Post had more than 1 million followers. The five have paid verification fees to X, suggesting that their disinformation campaign, which targets hashtags that disrupt discourse about U.S. politics, appears to be backed by X.
Renee DiResta, SIO’s technical research manager, criticized Company X’s decision to stop working with other platforms.
“The existence of these accounts confirms the fact that state actors continue to influence U.S. politics in the guise of the media and their own countrymen,” DiResta told the Post. Influence your efforts. That cooperation seems to have stalled, and Twitter doesn’t seem to be addressing the networks identified by its peers either, which isn’t great. ”
Musk shut down Company X’s election integrity team. claimed The team is actually “undermining” the integrity of the election. But analysts say that just as rapid advances in AI technology have made it harder for the public to spot misinformation spread through text, images, audio and video, some major platforms are It has removed its policy on election misinformation, warning that a flood of misinformation could sway the 2024 election.
In one notable example, a fake robocaller used AI voice technology to impersonate Biden and instruct people not to vote for the Democratic Party. The incident appears to have prompted the Federal Trade Commission on Thursday to propose penalties for AI impersonation.
It’s clear that foreign organizations’ propaganda accounts on X are using every tool available to get their content noticed, and we expect Musk’s platform will likely be the last to crack down on them. It seems that. According to the Post, some of the X accounts spreading propaganda used what appeared to be AI-generated images of Biden and Donald Trump to garner tens of thousands of views on their posts. It is said that there is.
As the election approaches, it’s possible that X will begin to tighten its control over content. Yesterday, X joined Amazon, Google, Meta, OpenAI, TikTok, and other Big Tech companies in signing an agreement to combat “deceptive uses of AI” during the 2024 election. Among the main goals identified in the AI Elections Agreement are identifying the sources of propaganda, detecting how it spreads across platforms, and gaining experience in dealing with propaganda. “To engage in collective efforts to evaluate and learn from results.”