X, formerly known as Twitter, has removed the feature that allowed users to report electoral misinformation in Australia, according to a research organisation.
Reset.Tech, which works at the intersection of tech and democracy, has published an open letter following the suspension of X’s reporting feature for electoral misinformation in the country. Terming the development “extremely concerning”, the letter says X stands in violation of Australia’s misinformation code by disabling the function, which obligates tech companies to enable users to report content that violates their own policies through “publicly available and accessible reporting tools”.
The feature had been accessible in Australia since 2021 when it was rolled out in various leading markets, including the US and South Korea. It was later expanded to Brazil, Spain and the Philippines last year. The feature, along with other separate tools to report hate speech and abuse, allowed users to report content they believed was misleading. The flagged tweets were forwarded to the staff at then Twitter, who made a final decision as to whether it would stay up on the platform or be taken down. The users, however, are still able to report other violations, such as online hate and violence.
The development arrives just three weeks before Australia holds a major referendum on a series of proposed changes to the constitution and over a year before the next US presidential election. The letter, which is addressed to X’s managing director for Australia, raises concern that sensitive content might be left on the platform without an adequate and effective review process. Reset.Tech had earlier highlighted X’s failure to remove or label posts fraught with misinformation about the upcoming referendum despite the now-disabled feature in function.
Twitter, which was rebranded to X in July this year, has a history of being weaponised in politically motivated campaigns around the world. Research also establishes that the platform, with its simple sharing features (“retweet” now called “repost”) for tweets, is more likely to spread misinformation and disinformation. X’s machine learning models that predict user engagement for content recommendations also cause misinformation to spread faster than on other platforms.
Moreover, X’s struggles with hashtags in non-English languages render it a convenient forum to execute and run coordinated disinformation campaigns, exacerbating the situation even further in South Asian markets. Since Musk’s $44 billion takeover of the company, X has already been under the scrutiny of regulators and digital safety advocates for failing to curb alarming levels of hate speech and abuse. Musk, on the other hand, has repeatedly said that online hate has declined significantly under his management. These claims have been rejected by research from academic and civil society organisations.
