Musk’s X is the biggest purveyor of disinformation: EU official

 A top European Union official said Tuesday that social network X, formerly kwn as Twitter, is biggest source of fake news and urged owner Elon Musk to comply with bloc’s laws aimed at combating disinformation.

Ahe of upcoming elections, Google, TikTok, Microsoft and Meta also have more to do to tackle disinformation, much of it coming from Russia, which is using social media to w a “war of ideas” against democracy, European Commission Vice President Vera Jourova said.

Moscow’s disinformation operation “is a multimillion-euro weapon of mass manipulation aimed both internally at Russians as well as at Europeans and rest of world,” she said at a press briefing in Brussels.

With elections scheduled in Slovakia and Poland in coming weeks and a bloc-wide vote next year, big online platforms must dress risk of online meddling, she said.

Kremlin and or malicious actors “will try to use design features of platforms to manipulate,” Jourova said.

She was providing an update on 27-nation EU’s 2022 Code of Practice on Disinformation. Google, TikTok, Microsoft and Facebook and Instagram parent Meta signed up to voluntary code last year, but Twitter dropped out after Musk bought platform.

X is “ platform with largest ratio of mis- or disinformation posts,” Jourova said.

An email to company’s press team seeking comment resulted in an automatically generated reply that said, “Busy w, please check back later.”

European Commission, EU’s executive arm, released a study of six online platforms in Poland, Slovakia and Spain that found Twitter h highest prevalence of disinformation and biggest ratio of disinformation actors.

“Twitter has highest discoverability” of disinformation, report said.

Jourova warned Musk that “he is t off hook” just because his company dropped out of code. code has been incorporated into a strict new set of mandatory European regulations kwn as  Digital Services Act, which subjects biggest online platforms, including X, to highest level of scrutiny.

w, “re are obligations given by hard law, so my mess for Twitter is: ‘You have to comply with hard law, and we will be watching what you are doing,’” she said.

Under code, online platforms agree to commit to measures aimed at reducing disinformation and have to file reports on a regular basis.

After submitting “ baseline” reports, ir first six-month reports outlining how y’re living up to those promises were released Tuesday.