Fewer fact checks, more disinformation
Since Elon Musk fired the team responsible for election integrity at X, fake news has increased significantly on the platform. This will probably also have an impact on future elections.
Transcript
00:00 Bots are a known problem on social media. They're used to create reach and push political
00:05 agendas and can be automated or semi-automated. You can sometimes spot them by their handles,
00:11 which are often randomly generated. Bots can perform at a scale humans can't - posting,
00:17 liking, sharing and commenting minute by minute.
00:22 When one of their posts is seen as popular by the AI of the social media platform, it
00:26 gets shared even further - even when that post contains misinformation or is a deepfake
00:32 because so far social media hasn't mastered reading these out.
00:38 When Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it into X, he also disbanded the election integrity
00:42 team which have been keeping an eye on political disinformation and deepfakes on Twitter.
00:51 Musk made his position clear in a tweet. According to Musk, the integrity team were inhibiting
00:56 the free exchange of opinions ahead of US elections. His idea is that users should track
01:02 down and report fake news or deepfakes themselves with so-called community notes. But whether
01:07 that can work in practice is debatable.
01:12 Google and Meta are taking a different approach.
01:14 "
01:15 (upbeat music)