This is because Russian propaganda drives clicks and makes them money

Tech firms fail to tackle Russian propaganda by choosing to ignore it and increase their bottom-line revenue

ftfy

It was out of control before the pandemic.

They advertise literal scam. What did you expect of them?

Muskchan isn’t failing to control Russian propaganda; it’s succeeding at allowing it to flourish unchecked, while labelling the NPRs and ABCs of this world as “government mouthpieces”. Everything is going very much to plan.

Perhaps it’s a purely business decision: help Putin with his goals and maybe Tesla can get a sweet deal on those rare-earths under Siberia or something. Perhaps it’s a shared contempt for the liberal institutions Russia’s bot farms are trying to bring down. Or perhaps it’s more personal: a rapport between two self-identified alpha males, both intuitively understanding themselves as Nietzschean Supermen, above the petty concerns of slave morality that bind lesser men. Whichever it is, it’s too consistent to be a coincidence.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Social media companies have failed to stop “large-scale” Russian disinformation campaigns since the invasion of Ukraine, the EU has said.

The study, published on Wednesday, looks at attempts to deal with Kremlin-backed disinformation and suggests the rise has been “driven in particular by the dismantling of Twitter’s safety standards”.

Earlier this month tougher rules under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) were introduced for the world’s biggest online platforms.

The study concluded that if the DSA had been operational before last month, social media companies would have breached their legal duties - resulting in possible fines.

“Over the course of 2022, the audience and reach of Kremlin-aligned social media accounts increased substantially all over Europe,” the study found.

The report also refers to a tweet from 9 April in which Elon Musk confirmed his platform would no longer “limit” Kremlin-run accounts.

The original article contains 398 words, the summary contains 141 words. Saved 65%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

Good.