Elon Musk couldn’t seem to find any Hamas-Israel disinformation on X, so we found a bunch for him

Thierry Breton, the European commissioner charged with enforcing the E.U.’s new Digital Services Act (DSA), warned on Tuesday that X’s platform has become overrun with “disinformation” and “violent and terrorist” content since Hamas’s October 7 attacks. Breton gave Elon Musk 24 hours to respond with how his company plans to fix that—or else risk facing an investigation that, per the DSA’s rules, could lead to fines of up to 6% of X’s revenue. (The act, which rolled out in full force in August, requires major social networks to take specific actions to monitor and remove harmful content.)

“We have, from qualified sources, reports about potentially illegal content circulating on your service despite flags from relevant authorities,” Breton’s letter informs Musk, noting that “public media and civil society organisations widely report instances of fake and manipulated images and facts . . . such as repurposed old images of unrelated armed conflicts or military footage that actually originated from video games.”

Breton ended with an ultimatum (“I urge you to ensure a prompt, accurate and complete response to this request within the next 24 hours”) that set off a feisty exchange.

Musk denied knowing about the disinformation. “Our policy is everything is open source and transparent,” he replied. “Please list the violations you allude to on ????, so that that [sic] the public can see them.”

Breton replied, “You are well aware of your users’—and authorities’—reports on fake content and glorification of violence. Up to you to demonstrate that you walk the talk.”

“We take our actions in the open,” Musk shot back. “No back room deals. Please post your concerns explicitly on this platform.”

Later on, a few hours prior to the 24-hour deadline, he told followers, “I still don’t know what they’re talking about! Maybe it’s in the mail or something.”

Disinformation has, in fact, plagued the platform for months, as Musk continues to abolish the departments and teams tasked with content moderation. (The latest development: X recently nixed a disinformation-fighting software tool that would have helped identify content to remove this weekend, according to a new report by The Information.)

It’s not the only site under fire, either: On Wednesday, Breton sent a similar letter to Meta, giving it 24 hours to address its own disinformation. (In response, a Meta spokesperson told news outlets that it created a “special operations center with experts, including fluent in Hebrew and Arabic speakers.”)

X claims it’s treating all posts about the Hamas-Israel conflict with the “highest level of response.” Yet reporters and watchdog groups have spent the past four days offering explicit examples of disinformation, in case Musk needs a list:

BBC journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh has been posting a thread every day rounding up the latest most egregious instances. In the one above—Tuesday’s—he begins with a video that supposedly depicts Israel bombing Gaza with white phosphorous weapons, but actually shows Russia using incendiary munitions against Ukraine back in March. In other posts flagged by him, the controlled demolition of Chinese high-rises and soccer fans celebrating in Algiers with fireworks were mislabeled as Israel attacking buildings in Gaza. Yet another video purporting to show the conflict is actually a scene found in the video game Arma 3.

Elsewhere, researchers with Alethea, a company that analyzes disinformation, report that they found a coordinated disinformation campaign carried out by a network of 67 different X accounts. They say many of the accounts previously posted about mundane topics (the NBA, everyday life in Japan), but once Hamas attacked this weekend, they began posting the same false, inflammatory content about the war, all at the same time, suggesting such efforts are slipping through the cracks easily, unchecked by X.

In one example, old videos of President Vladimir Putin and Russia’s foreign minister were spliced together and captioned to suggest that Russia is threatening to aid Palestine if the U.S. intervenes in Gaza. By Tuesday afternoon, the accounts’ posts had reportedly racked up millions of views, and NBC News reported that while X shut some of them down, several still remained live.

Fast Company won’t be linking to these, but scores of other posts have circulated that capture the war’s horrific violence up close, among them videos allegedly showing the ghastly murder of civilians or Israeli soldiers being gunned down, sometimes with captions that praise the acts of terrorism or use hate speech.

Researchers compared the incidence of graphic violent content on social media platforms for Politico Europe, and on Monday the news site published their findings. “There is a huge prevalence of extremely graphic violent material on X,” Tech Against Terrorism director Adam Hadley told the outlet. “This doesn’t appear to be the same on other large platforms.”

However, it’s unclear why Musk needs examples from others—on Sunday, he himself recommended users follow two accounts known for posting extremely unreliable “news” content. “For following the war in real-time, @WarMonitors & @sentdefender are good,” he told his nearly 160 million followers. The post was viewed more than 10 million times before Musk deleted it three hours later. On top of misinformation, the @WarMonitors account in particular has a history of conspicuous antisemitism, posting, among other tweets, that “the overwhelming majority of people in the media and banks are zi0nists,” and telling a user in June to “go worship a jew lil bro.”

Musk’s recommendation drew a prompt rebuke from CNN’s Jake Tapper, who apparently did not need long to find an instance when @WarMonitors told Morton Williams supermarket chain co-owner Avi Kaner—also in June—to “mind your own business, jew.” Tapper noted, “Elon Musk lauds this bigot as a good source of information, part Infiniti.”

But as Musk taunts the E.U.’s commissioner of internal markets, the company itself seems to be taking a different tack. CEO Linda Yaccarino has now canceled two separate conference appearances, explaining on Monday night that the chaos unfolding on the platform has required her to “remain fully focused on X platform safety.”

https://www.fastcompany.com/90966059/elon-musk-x-twitter-hamas-israel-disinformation?partner=rss&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=rss+fastcompany&utm_content=rss