Ads on Musk-owned social media site risk causing ‘reputational damage’ to the EU, its executive says in internal note.

The European Commission has decided to stop advertising on social media platform X, owned by Elon Musk, over “widespread concerns relating to the spread of disinformation,” according to an internal note obtained by POLITICO’s Brussels Playbook.

In a note sent to all heads of service and directors general, the Commission’s Deputy Chief Spokesperson Dana Spinant said disinformation on X, especially in relation to the Israel-Hamas war, had led the institution to “recommend to temporarily suspend advertising on this platform until further notice to avoid risks of reputational damage to the Commission.”

X has been under growing scrutiny in Europe as a result of the bloc’s new content moderation law, the Digital Services Act (DSA). The Commission, which enforces the law, in October sent a formal request for information to the company to explain how its handling of illegal content and disinformation connected to Hamas’ October 7 attack complies with the DSA.

  • lurch (he/him)English
    7•1 year ago

    I tried it and left it many years ago. It was obvious, not having downvotes made it easy to agree, but more effort to disagree with posts and comments. In order to disagree, you have to write a comment, which also could be buried if many people responded. To agree you just press a button, which also conveniently shows a counter. The author of a Twitter post may never see the 2000 disagreeing replies behind the 100 first agreeing by his followers. He looks at the likes and sees 500 “wow nice”, but he can’t see thousands of people who didn’t have time to reply and didn’t have a downvote button.

    • @blackbelt352English
      3•1 year ago

      You’re right that performi g agreement and disagreement are certainly not equal on Twitter, but there is also the concept of ratio-ing where tons of quote tweets and replies compared to few likes is usually a good indicator that people are disagreeing.

      • @[email protected]English
        2•1 year ago

        This actually says a lot about Twitter engagement.

        The only way to disagree on Twitter is to publicly call people out, while Lemmy and Reddit allow you to disagree without repeating and amplifying what they are saying.