If Elon Musk’s Twitter is already a dunghill where toxicity and misinformation run rampant in the face of a non-existent human moderation system and a detection algorithm that suspends non-compliant accounts, the situation does not seem to be improving in the long term.
A few days ago, Twitter withdrew from the European Union’s Code of Best Practices on online disinformation. This was announced on Twitter by Thierry Breton, the EU’s Internal Market Commissioner, who used his post on the social network to issue a blunt warning to the platform, saying that Twitter cannot hide from its legal responsibility in this area.
“Twitter leaves the voluntary EU Code of Best Practice against disinformation. But the obligations remain. You can run, but you can’t hide,” Breton said, referring to the obligations the social network is obliged to fulfill as a large online platform (VLOP) under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA).
“Beyond voluntary commitments, the fight against disinformation will be a legal obligation under the #DSA as of August 25. Our teams will be ready to enforce the law”, the Commissioner added.
According to the pan-European law, which came into force in November, VLOPs such as Twitter that offer their services on European territory are obliged to assess and mitigate systemic risks to civic discourse and electoral processes, such as disinformation. The deadline for VLOPs to comply with the DSA obligations is three months, counting from last week.
Elon Musk, considered by one study to be Twitter’s biggest enemy, already ran into trouble last month with German authorities after Germany’s Federal Office of Justice found “sufficient indications of failures” in Twitter’s complaint handling processes, which allegedly facilitated the spread of disinformation and hate speech content.
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