When 30-year-old Jack Dorsey founded Twitter in 2006, he had no way of knowing the platform would become one of the leading ways our world views and understands foreign conflict. Just five years after Twitter went live, Abbottabad resident Sohaib Athar made history by unwittingly live-tweeting Osama bin Laden’s assassination. Athar’s social media post scooped the cable news media by a mile.
Over the weekend, social media again served as the world’s eyes and ears during a brutal terrorist attack in Israel that involved more than a thousand members of Palestinian Islamist group Hamas. The videos and images that emerged over the past week showcase the anger and grief of a nation wrestling with unspeakable loss. At the same time, Twitter’s firehose of real-time posts also allowed malicious actors to knowingly post disinformation with the goal of sowing confusion and chaos both within Israel and abroad.
On Tuesday, European governments finally called foul.
In a terse letter to the owner of Twitter, now X, Elon Musk, European regulator Thierry Breton accused the company of platforming “violent and terrorist content” and Israel-related disinformation intentionally spread by bad actors. Breton demanded Musk respond within 24 hours — failing to comply would mean escalating fines equal to about 6 percent of Twitter’s annual revenue. For his part, Musk seems to be having too much fun sowing his own wartime disinformation to care about European laws.
Twitter does have an alleged CEO, Linda Yaccarino. You’d be forgiven for forgetting she exists, given her near-invisible presence at a company where Musk still calls the shots. Well, you certainly won’t be hearing from her about all of this. Perhaps fearing she’d face tough questions about Twitter’s role spreading wartime disinformation, Yaccarino abruptly canceled her scheduled appearance at a Wall Street Journal conference. Twitter’s executives, it seems, aren’t feeling very social. It’s easy to see why.
Instead of strengthening Twitter’s infrastructure to make it harder for bad actors to post potentially dangerous disinformation, Musk is doing his part to add as much confusion as possible. Not only has Musk shared content that later proved to be untrue, he amplified prominent misinformation accounts already known to be purveyors of unreliable, conspiratorial or outright bogus tales.
BBC reporter Shayan Sardarizadeh spends his day tracking all the misinformation about the Israel-Hamas conflict circulating on Twitter. Every day Sardarizadeh finds outrageous new examples of unchecked fakery, like a bogus Jerusalem Post account that falsely claimed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been hospitalized. Another posted footage of an attack that happened in another country. Accounts bearing blue Verified badges even passed off video game footage as real images from Gaza, fooling a few news outlets in the process.
This was not a universal problem: Among all social media platforms, Musk’s Twitter has repeatedly proven itself outstandingly vulnerable to disinformation campaigns. That could be because Musk fired almost all of Twitter’s Trust and Safety team, shrinking one of the company’s largest divisions down to fewer than 20 full-time workers. That purge already landed Musk in hot water in Germany, where a Jewish student group sued Twitter over its failure to comply with German laws requiring the prompt removal of neo-Nazi and antisemitic content.
Musk also governs Twitter with a much-touted but unevenly applied “free speech absolutist” policy, meaning fewer posts are being removed for violating the site’s terms. That means posts are more likely to linger on the site, racking up views. If that’s not bad enough, Musk has monetized this whole nightmare, meaning successful disinformation can be wildly profitable for its authors through Twitter’s revenue-sharing program. That isn’t a theoretical concern, either: Musk has already handed fat checks to large accounts, including one known for peddling child sexual abuse imagery alongside a regular stream of right-wing conspiracy theories.
Disinformation vendors thrive on clicks and engagement, and they know that few events fuel as much rapid-fire clicking and thoughtless engagement as terrorist attacks and wars. In Israel they now have both, coupled with a social media platform that is both ideologically unwilling and infrastructurally unable to separate true reporting from potentially malicious disinformation.
Europe’s concerns over Musk’s disinformation machine won’t be the last. The Ukrainian government is apparently none too happy at Twitter for a viral fake news blurb claiming the Ukrainian military sold weapons to Hamas. Inflammatory, false content like that is now Twitter’s export commodity, and Musk subsidizes its spread like any government would: by rewarding the highest-performing scammers with the biggest paychecks.
European regulators are right to see Musk’s disastrous Twitter management as dangerous to global stability. The Senate must follow suit and ask Twitter’s evasive executives why they are bankrolling malicious disinformation that weakens our allies and sows chaos in times of international crisis.
Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.