Twitter lacks transparency in the fight against misinformation: report

Paris:

Twitter has shown a lack of transparency in its fight against disinformation, Arcom, the French regulator responsible for digital communications, said Monday.

In a third annual report on “the fight against the manipulation of information,” Arcom pointed to Twitter’s “very loose data transparency” on the matter, adding that the company had provided “inaccurate” details about how its automated tools worked.

A Twitter spokesperson in France did not immediately respond to messages asking for comment. The spokesperson has not responded to questions since Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter last month.

Arcom has no authority to penalize online platforms for spreading false information.

But under a French law passed in 2018, 12 of these platforms must disclose the processes they have put in place to address their own definition of misinformation, leading to “naming and shaming” presentations by the authority.

The 12 online platforms include Alphabet’s YouTube, Wikipedia’s online encyclopedia, Meta’s Facebook and — for the first time — the fast-growing short-video platform TikTok, owned by China-based company ByteDance.

French laws also force major online platforms to provide their users with means to report false information that could change the possible outcome of an election.

According to Arcom’s report, Twitter wasn’t the worst in class.

“TikTok, Yahoo and to a lesser extent Google are particularly notable for the lack of tangible information that allows Arcom” to analyze the effectiveness of measures to combat information manipulation, according to the authority.

The report comes a week after the head of Twitter France announced his resignation.

Twitter laid off half of its workforce earlier in November and after the Musk acquisition, including teams responsible for communications, content curation, human rights and machine learning ethics, as well as some product and engineering teams.

In its filings with Arcom ahead of the Musk acquisition, Twitter said it had 34 permanent employees in France, where it generated $11.8 million in revenue in 2021.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and is being published from a syndicated feed.)