The EU has issued a warning to Elon Musk to comply with sweeping new laws on fake news and Russian propaganda, after X – formerly known as Twitter – was found to have the highest ratio of disinformation posts of all large social media platforms.
The report analysed the ratio of disinformation for a new report laying bare for the first time the scale of fake news on social media across the EU, with millions of fake accounts removed by TikTok and LinkedIn.
Facebook was the second worst offender, according to the first ever report recording posts that will be deemed illegal across the EU under the Digital Services Act (DSA), which came into force in August.
Nevertheless, Facebook and other tech giants, including Google, TikTok and Microsoft, have signed up to the code of practice the EU drew up to ensure they could get ready in time to operate within the confines of the new laws.
Twitter left the code of practice but it is obliged under the new law to comply with the rules or face a ban across the EU.
"Better" is not always quite as easy.
Sometimes large public reach is incredibly important (and sometimes even more important than e2e encryption). So yes, for many things having a private medium is the way better choice, but for others the tradeoff between that and having a large reach works differently (and yes, obviously a super-secure, unmonitored medium with huge reach would probably be the best for many things, but I'm not aware of such a thing).
As an example, the 2011 Egyptian revolution was to a large degree organized over Twitter. There's a lot to be said about the suboptimal tool you can use versus the perfect tool that doesn't help.