EU rips Twitter over disinformation report

LONDON — Twitter failed to provide a full report to the European Union on its efforts to combat online disinformation, drawing a rebuke Thursday from top officials of the 27-nation bloc.

The company signed up to the EU’s voluntary 2022 Code of Practice on Disinformation last year — before billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk bought the social media platform.

All who signed up to the code, including online platforms, ad-tech companies and civil society, agreed to commit to measures aimed at reducing disinformation. They filed their first “baseline” reports last month showing how they’re living up to their promises.

Google, TikTok, Microsoft as well as Facebook and Instagram parent Meta showed “strong commitment to the reporting,” providing unprecedented detail about how they’re putting into action their pledges to fight false information, according to the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm. Twitter, however, “provided little specific information and no targeted data,” it said.

In its baseline report, Twitter said it’s “making real advancements across the board” at fighting disinformation. The document came in at 79 pages, at least half the length of those filed by Google, Meta, Microsoft and TikTok.

Many whose job it was to keep harmful information off Twitter’s platform have been laid off or quit since Musk bought the company last year.

Tech companies signed up to the EU code have to fill out a checklist to measure their work on fighting disinformation, covering efforts to prevent fake news purveyors from benefiting from advertising revenue; the number of political ads labeled or rejected; examples of manipulative behavior such as fake accounts; and information on the impact of fact-checking.

Google’s report indicated that it prevented more than $14 million of advertising revenue from reaching disinformation actors, while TikTok’s report said it removed more than 800,000 fake accounts.