X hasn’t sent a representative in months to biweekly information-sharing meetings with other social media companies
Propaganda accounts controlled by foreign entities aiming to influence U.S. politics are flourishing on X even after they’ve been exposed by other social media platforms or criminal proceedings, a Washington Post analysis shows.
Previously, tech companies including Twitter, Facebook owner Meta and Google’s YouTube worked with each other, outside researchers and federal law enforcement agencies to limit foreign interference campaigns, following revelations that Russian operatives used fake social media accounts to spread misinformation and exacerbate divisions in 2016.
But X has been largely absent from that effort since Elon Musk bought it in 2022, when it was still Twitter, and for months hasn’t sent representatives to biweekly meetings in which the companies share notes on networks of fake accounts they are investigating or planning to take down, according to other participants. “They just kind of disappeared,” one said.
The result has been that accounts spreading disinformation that the other social media companies took down remain active on X. That allows the disinformation to be spread from there, including back to the other platforms.
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“There has been a markedly increased emphasis in [Communist] Party leadership in taking a much more robust approach to influencing foreign audiences through all tools available at their disposal,” said Kieran Green, an analyst for advisory firm Exovera and the lead author of a study being published Friday on Chinese censorship and propaganda for the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a body Congress created in 2000 to monitor U.S.-China relations.
“Methods include flooding hashtags with junk, impersonating high-profile experts that are critical of the government and using bot accounts to give the false impression of social consensus,” Green said. “The object is not necessarily to change hearts and minds but to muddy the discourse to the degree that it’s impossible to form an anti-China narrative.”
Who votes with their brain? Voting from the heart makes me feel good! /s