With just weeks to go before a contentious Australian referendum on indigenous rights, X has scrapped a tool designed to allow users to report election misinformation.
According to digital democracy think tank Reset.Tech Australia, X, formerly known as Twitter, has pulled the tool, except in the E.U.. It was initially introduced as a test feature in August last year, in the U.S, Australia and South Korea, and was later expanded to other countries, including Brazil, Spain and the Philippines.
The move comes as Australia prepares to vote in a referendum on whether to change the constitution to give Indigenous people more rights through the creation of an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice.
“There now appears to be no channel to report electoral misinformation when discovered on your platform,” Reset.Tech writes to Angus Keene, X’s managing director of Australia and New Zealand.
“It is extremely concerning that Australians would lose the ability to report serious misinformation weeks away from a major referendum.”
Until now, users could report electoral misinformation along with other problematic content such as hate speech, abuse, spam, or imitation. Now, though, “It’s misleading” is no longer an option with the Political category.
“This may leave violative content subject to an inappropriate review process and not labelled or removed in compliance with your policies,” warns Reset.Tech Australia.
The group suggests that X may be breaching its commitments under Australia’s misinformation code, which gives users the right to “report content or behaviors to Signatories that violate their policies… through publicly available and accessible reporting tools”.
The Australian referendum has been beset with misinformation. According to cybersecurity intelligence firm Recorded Future, there are five key false narratives: that the Voice will lead to racial segregation, is part of a Jewish plot, aims to establish communism, invites a globalist invasion, and introduces an “aboriginal tax”.
The move comes just weeks after an X blog post in which the company pledged to expand its safety and elections teams to focus on combating manipulation. However, according to reports, it’s doing the opposite, cutting around half of the global team fighting disinformation and election fraud.
The claims coincide with an E.U. report finding that, following its withdrawal from the EU’s Code of Practice on Disinformation in May, X has the worst record of tech platforms for countering disinformation and misinformation.
“X, former Twitter, who is not under the Code any more is the platform with the largest ratio of mis/disinformation posts,” says commissioner for values and transparency Vera Jourova.
“The pilot also showed that disinformation actors were found to have significantly more followers than their non-disinformation counterparts and tend to have joined the platform more recently than non-disinformation users.”
X has since responded, rejecting the criticism and claiming that other social networking services saw greater changes in subscriber growth and total growth for pro-Kremlin accounts.
The company has replied to questions with the message “Busy now, please check back later”—a welcome change from the poo emoji.
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