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.”
Or if Americans didn’t hate each other so much over trivial bullshit, it also wouldn’t be much of a problem.
I mean, it’d be great if people would stop being racist, sexist and queerphobic, and so on. I don’t think rolling everything up into “trivial bullshit” really does justice to the scope of the hate and its consequences, though.
The ruzzian interference is why they hate
Chaos and civil war were two main objectives for the 2016 GRU operation
It just succeeded beyond their expectations
I hate the fascists because of the fascist things they say and do.
Dumbya crystallized for me that republicans are retrograde degenerates.
Is this a lack of historical context? We’ve hated each other LOOOONG before Russia started stoking fires. We hated each other to the point of an actual civil war in 1860, when the Russians were too busy with Crimea and China to care about American affairs.
It’s too easy to blame our divisiveness on outside forces, but the reality is it’s all home-grown.
No one’s stating otherwise. However, I think you’re the one lacking context here. If you look at the division in this country in the 1990s or even the 2000s, Americans were at least civil in their disagreements with each other for the most part. Additionally, the vast majority of people would at least condemn politicians that were caught red-handed doing crazy, corrupt, illegal shit, regardless of party.
Starting around 2015 onward, the division that was there suddenly started getting way, way worse. It’s been verifiably shown that Russian and Chinese social media psyops campaigns have been extremely successful not only in the US, but in numerous countries around the world.
That’s cherry picking back in time kind of whataboutism
Were talking about how bad it’s become recently
There’s nothing trivial about fascism, bigotry and oppression. Conservatism is a plague of all three.
Ya know, that’s kinda my point.
Fascism, bigotry, and oppression are things people do. They are not, themselves, people. A fascist is a person that engages in fascism, yes, but they’re still a person doing things.
It’s kinda like love the person, hate the sin. I think the goal should be to alleviate the need for people to turn to fascism, bigotry, and oppression as solutions to social problems by making their lives better. That’s not say they won’t still engage in fascism, bigotry, and oppression, but that the likelihood that they do so will decrease.