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According to a study released this week by the European Commission, the European Union’s governing body, Twitter under Elon Musk’s leadership played a major role in allowing Russian propaganda about Ukraine to reach more people than before the war began.
The investigation found that Russian disinformation against Ukraine flourished despite voluntary commitments from the largest social media companies, including Meta, to crack down on Russian propaganda. The unrestricted spread of disinformation and hate speech would have breached the Digital Services Act, the EU’s social media law, if it had been in force last year, the year-long Commission study concluded.
“Over the course of 2022, the audience and reach of pro-Kremlin social media accounts across Europe increased significantly,” the study said. “Preliminary analysis suggests that the reach and influence of Kremlin-backed accounts continued to increase in the first half of 2023, particularly as a result of Twitter’s removal of security standards.”
The EU has taken a far more aggressive regulatory approach to state-sponsored disinformation than the United States. The Digital Services Act, which came into force on August 25 for the largest social media companies, requires them to assess the risk of false information. Stop algorithms from amplifying the worst and audit their performance. Separately, European sanctions against Russian state media have led YouTube and other platforms to ban companies such as RT, the Russian news channel formerly known as Russia Today and once one of the most viewed channels.
The study is the clearest indication yet that the legal and voluntary measures are not working, after EU Commissioner Thierry Breton warned in June that Twitter, now called X, still had work to do to avoid potentially massive fines under the DSA to avoid. The research was conducted by the nonprofit analysis group Reset, which advocates for greater oversight of digital platforms.
Without full access to the data held by the companies – data that must be made more available under the new law – Reset relied on public information, such as the number of interactions that triggered problematic content from people who contributed to the account she posted, were unfollowed.
The study found that Musk’s Twitter was not alone in failing to stop the spread of Russian propaganda. Instagram and Facebook, which are owned by Meta, also faced criticism.
“In absolute numbers, pro-Kremlin accounts continue to reach the largest audience on the meta platforms. Meanwhile, viewership for Kremlin-backed accounts on Telegram has more than tripled,” the group wrote since the Russian invasion in February 2022. “In repeated testing of user notification systems in multiple Central and Eastern European languages, we found that no platform violates their terms of service applied consistently.”
Reset senior adviser Felix Karttre told The Washington Post that the myriad propaganda campaigns used hate speech, empowered extremists and threatened national security, potentially impacting next year’s European elections.
The researchers said the law and social media companies were not equipped for a full-scale information war of the kind Russia has waged through state official accounts, affiliated accounts and others. Russian interests also coordinated actions by volunteers on Telegram channels like Cyber Front Z, who pushed concurrent posts to manipulate the formulas that promote popular content. They reported pro-Ukraine votes en masse to ban them and accused others of doxxing and other threats.
Using a key technique, the propagandists first published numerous news stories in unregulated areas with less traffic and then promoted these posts with links on more popular channels.
“NO [social media] The platform implemented policies affecting all or even most Kremlin-operated accounts,” they wrote. “Furthermore, platforms generally ignored cross-platform coordinated campaigns.”
X and Meta did not respond to requests for comment.
Although the main period of the study was 2022, “the reach of pro-Kremlin accounts increased between January and May 2023, with average engagement across all online platforms increasing by 22 percent,” Reset noted. “However, this increased reach was largely due to the following [X]where engagement increased 36 percent after CEO Elon Musk decided to lift mitigation measures on Kremlin-backed accounts, arguing that “all news is propaganda to some degree.”
Musk withdrew his social media platform from the widely touted voluntary code of conduct to combat disinformation in June 2022, and he has relaxed content rules and cut enforcement staff.
Under Musk’s leadership, the company abandoned the state-affiliated media labels it had applied to RT and other Kremlin-controlled accounts. Propagandists have also paid for the platform’s Blue Check verification program to make their posts more visible.