Twitter has removed labels that designate media accounts of communication around the world as controlled or financed by governmentsallowing propaganda from China, Russia and other countries to be more seen and believed.
The measure was adopted late on Thursday, while many Twitter followers were distracted by the removal of hundreds of thousands of blue ticks handed down from verified public figures, and in the same week that it was revealed that Russia and China had been operating armies of fake profiles to influence the American debate.
“It is clear that state actors continue to invest in influence operations,” he said. Lisa Kaplan, CEO of the Alethea Group, which tracks the spread of false narratives. “By removing the state media labels, these outlets can now operate without users realizing that the information is likely to be biased.”
During the chaotic five months since the billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter with the help of minority investors from Saudi Arabia and other countries, Tesla’s CEO has brought back accounts that had been banned for spreading lies and fired staff who had been hunting propaganda campaigns that used networks of automated accounts disguised as people living in the targeted countries.
Musk has called himself a “free speech absolutist” and has said more extensive checks would help the cause of citizen journalism. “It’s very important to hear the voice of the people,” he said in a recent video interview. “The real voice of the people, not the filtered voice of the people, and let the people choose the narrative, and let the people determine the truth and not five editors-in-chief of big publications.”
After publicly questioning why news from a government should be treated differently from news from private companies or non-profit groups, Musk this month placed state-affiliation labels on NPR, the British Broadcasting Corp and others with public funding but independent control of its contents.
The ensuing backlash, which included NPR’s removal from Twitter, gave Musk the opportunity to remove all such hashtags, which, according to former employees, RT Russia had been seeking since shortly after Musk took office.
Kaplan said some government-controlled accounts could appeal to a broader audience with well-produced content, but they also spread falsehoods on many topics that can divide people, such as COVID-19 and police violence.
Twitter has also ended its policy of not recommending state-backed media to users. According to the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Investigation Laboratory, this has begun to help a wide range of such outlets, including those based in China, Russia and Iran, to reverse what had been months of steady loss of followers.
He editor-in-chief of RTtweeted on Friday, in Twitter’s machine translation of the Russian: “Twitter has unlabeled me and all of our channels as ‘publicly funded media.’ Now you can even find me on search.” Brotherly, Elon, from the heart.
Musk and his chief content moderator did not respond to a request for comment.
Before and after Musk bought Twitter, US authorities examined whether its foreign investors or Tesla’s reliance on manufacturing and sales in China gave them reason to oppose the transaction on national security grounds. They decided they had no authority to act, largely because Musk is a US citizen.
Twitter also receives a substantial amount of money from China, despite the service being banned there, former security chief Peiter Zatko said in a complaint last year.
The US government remains very concerned about influence operations by adversary governments, which in many cases combine official or pro-state media outlets with automated accounts and systems to make social media posts appear to attract more engagement, which can lead to to be promoted to more users.
On Sunday, The Washington Post reported that a top-secret document shared in a private Discord chat said that the US military had concluded that a Russian agency was becoming more competent and had claimed that its hundreds of thousands of bots were detected by most from social networks less than 1 percent of the time.
The next day, a US criminal complaint claimed that Chinese police had used thousands of fake accounts to both propaganda and harass and threaten government-critical expatriates living in the United States.
Twitter has also made it more difficult for researchers and academics to track influence operations by charging for access to large numbers of tweets.
Atlantic Council researcher Alyssa Kann said removing the labels is another blow to transparency that Musk has said he would prioritize.
“This change potentially it only makes it more difficult for users to distinguish between information that is trustworthy as opposed to that carried out by political actors,” Kann said.
(c) 2023, The Washington Post
Keep reading:
