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.”
I know we all want to blame external actors for election propaganda but I sincerely doubt it matters in a country as big as the U.S. We’re perfectly capable of flooding social media with radicalizing bullshit all by ourselves.
The 2020 election saw $14.4 billion in political spending and that’s just the candidates, parties, PACs, etc. required to report their spending. It doesn’t include party media like Fox News or the thousands of grifters saying inflammatory shit for clout and whatever minor ducats their Substacks bring in. I’m not saying Russia, China, Israel, and others don’t have social media operations. I’m saying their posts get lost in the cacophony of a presidential election and traditional corruption is the real issue.
Lots of people in Trump world have shady connections to Russia and Saudi Arabia. NYC’s current mayor is having that weird scandal over Turkish money. Sen. Menendez was allegedly in Egypt’s pocket. I doubt posts on X have anything like the same R.O.I. as buying a few Senators.
Their psyops campaigns were never about converting a large number of followers directly, they poison the well and convert a smaller number. From those people, the contamination spreads exponentially when combined with multifaceted propaganda avenues, e.g. Fox News, OAN, social media, etc. The added bonus of having financial incentives for regular people to become “influencers” makes the problem even worse, as you get opportunists who start echoing the propaganda as a day job despite not really having any personally invested feelings on the matter.
Yes, the US and other countries with the same divisive issues occurring right now had problems before. But the recent and current landscape have vastly amplified any division the previously existed.