The European Commission has decided to stop advertising on social media platform X, owned by Elon Musk, over “widespread concerns relating to the spread of disinformation,” according to an internal note obtained by POLITICO’s Brussels Playbook.
In a note sent to all heads of service and directors general, the Commission’s Deputy Chief Spokesperson Dana Spinant said disinformation on X, especially in relation to the Israel-Hamas war, had led the institution to “recommend to temporarily suspend advertising on this platform until further notice to avoid risks of reputational damage to the Commission.”
X has been under growing scrutiny in Europe as a result of the bloc’s new content moderation law, the Digital Services Act (DSA). The Commission, which enforces the law, in October sent a formal request for information to the company to explain how its handling of illegal content and disinformation connected to Hamas’ October 7 attack complies with the DSA.
I don’t have a Twitter account, but there isn’t really anything else comparable for when there’s a major incident, like a natural disaster. Random people from all over post video or relevant information, and Twitter’s search engine and hashtags are a pretty potent tool for connecting them quickly.
The Reddit or Threadiverse model isn’t really great for that – that uses pre-established communities.
I also don’t use Mastodon, but my understanding is that there isn’t a search engine there with the same instant global visibility as Twitter. If you want to follow individuals, I suppose it’s fine for that, but that’s really not something that I’m generally interested in doing. And it looks like Mastodon only even got full-text search very recently, like, last couple months.
At least for my use case, the Threadiverse is a much better replacement for Reddit than Mastodon is for Twitter.
This is what gets my conspiracy mind going. It feels like he is intentionally ruining it to reduce the flow of information. Yes, it’s a shit site, but people were able to organize pretty easily through it. Not so much anymore, unless you’re racist or a nazi. Maybe something will replace it, but the hindrance is already happening.
Also, this only works if the user opts in to being able to be searched/indexed. It makes it much harder to find content. If you’re looking for more content from a hashtag, you’ll only see people who knew to opt in
On Twitter, anyone’s content can be searched as long as they are not private. If you search a hashtag, you’ll see every public post that uses that hashtag.
Another annoying thing with Mastodon is that you have to go to the person’s instance to fully check their profile. Annoying when you’re using a Mastodon app, then it makes you open a web browser to go to that person’s instance
nothing I’m personally interested, but I can get behind that