The report, titled "Pay to Play," accuses the social media giant of enabling its verified users to generate 74% of the platform's most widely shared false or unsubstantiated claims about the continuing conflict.
The report condemns the platform's account verification process, which is designed to authenticate the account owner as a real person or entity, saying the protocol has done "nothing" to prevent "superspreaders of misinformation about the conflict."
The company's billionaire owner Elon Musk overhauled the platform's verification system in March after taking over as CEO in Oct. 2022, when he purchased the platform for $44 billion. Under Musk's system, users can pay $8 a month to display a blue checkmark on their profiles, which elevates their visibility on the site, while adding a layer of credibility with a vast audience.
"This means that they appear higher, with greater prominence, in users' feeds," the report states. "That decision turned out to be a boon for bad actors sharing misinformation" about the war.
During the first full week of the war, NewsGuard collected the 250 most-engaged posts -- including likes, reposts, replies, and bookmarks -- and found 186 of these were from verified accounts that promoted false or unsubstantiated claims about the war.
The report lists nearly a dozen instances of disinformation circulating on the platform unchecked, including false claims that would serve to incite the public, such as: Ukraine sold weapons to Hamas, Israel killed 33,000 Palestinian children since 2008, or that the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7 was a false flag event launched by Israel and the West.
The analysis also said fake videos were circulating on the site that purportedly showed things like Israeli senior officials captured by Hamas and Palestinian children in cages.
"Collectively, posts advancing these myths received 1,349,979 engagements and were cumulatively viewed by more than 100 million times globally in just one week," the report said.
The report takes issue with Musk's strategy for crowdsourced fact-checking through a feature called "Community Notes," which flagged only 79 of the 250 false posts identified in the study by NewsGuard.
"X's reliance on crowdsourced fact-checking through Community Notes, rather than by professional fact-checkers or other independent journalistic efforts, has been a hallmark of Musk's time as owner of X," the report states, adding that X's methods had failed so far to counter the most prominent viral myths emerging from the conflict.
NewsGuard also looked into misinformation circulating on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Telegram, and elsewhere, but took a deeper dive into Twitter as Musk has been vocal about cutting moderation efforts to promote freedom of speech on the platform.
On Oct. 13, the European Commission sought more information from X as part of an investigation into whether the platform was taking genuine steps to remove disinformation about the war.
Previously, the global body gave the company 24 hours to respond to demands for bolder actions to curtail persistent falsehoods on the site or face massive fines.
In response, X CEO Linda Yaccarino sent an email to the EU, saying the company planned to fully cooperate with European laws and had already removed hundreds of Hamas-affiliated accounts from the platform while "actively working" to address the incendiary content that remained.
"Since the terrorist attack on Israel, we have taken action to remove or label tens of thousands of pieces of content, while Community Notes are visible on thousands of posts, generating millions of impressions," Yaccarino wrote. "There is no place on X for terrorist organizations or violent extremist groups and we continue to remove such accounts in real time."
X has also begun testing a new $1 annual fee in New Zealand and the Philippines for new users to post content in an effort to combat non-human accounts or "bots."
Related Links
Cyberwar - Internet Security News - Systems and Policy Issues
| Subscribe Free To Our Daily Newsletters |
| Subscribe Free To Our Daily Newsletters |
