X.com has eliminated the ability for users to flag misinformation about political subjects in the latest rollback of the platform’s safety features.
Since Elon Musk took over the company last year he has made a series of decisions to disable or rollback features intended to weed out tweets that blatantly espouse election and political misinformation.
That feature was created in 2019 to help users flag misleading tweets about the COVID pandemic and elections.
Users can still report other users for content that uses hateful, violent, and abusive language.
The removal of the feature was first noticed by a think tank in Australia called Reset who penned an open letter to the company speaking of the dangers the decision will have on upcoming events.
Australia is preparing for a referendum vote shortly that seeks to give Australia’s indigenous peoples representation in government.
The topic is highly controversial and the organization worries that many right-wing opponents of the referendum will use X.com to spread lies in advance of the vote.
Similarly, the European Commission’s Vice President Vera Jourova called out social media platforms and X.com in particular for facilitating the spread of misinformation from Russian about the war in Ukraine.
The EU has implemented a code of conduct that nearly all major providers from Facebook to TikTok have signed on to regarding the need to police misinformation.
Vice President Jourova pointed out that X.com has not signed the code of conduct and has, by far, the largest ratio of mis/disinformation of all content providers.
Musk and X.com’s decision comes as the US is preparing for what is very likely to be a very contentious political season but the company has chosen not the reply to any of the criticism.
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