How more than 1,300 fake X accounts discredit the EU's support for Kyiv
09 September 2024
From 4 to 28 June 2024, 1,366 doppelgänger accounts (a German term used to identify fake accounts that look like real ones) published the same number of pro-Russian posts on X. The content was then amplified by interactions with many additional real accounts, which contributed to these posts reaching an audience of more than 4.6 million accounts. That's the conclusion of a report published by Counter Disinformation Network (CDN), a collaborative platform that gathers disinformation-countering practitioners in Europe.
The disinformation campaign has been conducted in German, French, English, Italian, Polish, and Ukrainian to criticise Ukraine and Western support for Kyiv, has exploited polarising issues and has targeted Western alliances. Next to the posts on X, 98 Facebook ads with pro-Russian content targeted France, Germany, Poland, and Italy within the same month. According to the most recent data, only 680 tweets were taken down by X, but 679 are still up and available to European audiences.
 | Lorenzo Di Stasi Facebook and X are both considered very large platforms by the Digital Services Act (DSA), as they have more than 45 million monthly active users in the European Union. The big tech companies must fulfil strict digital rules; otherwise, they risk fines of up to 6% of their annual turnover and a complete ban from EU markets. On 18 December 2023, the European Commission opened formal proceedings to assess whether X may have breached the DSA in areas linked to risk management, content moderation, dark patterns, advertising transparency, and data access for researchers. This isn't the first time disinformation was heavily publicised through X in Europe. In August, the social network owned by Elon Musk had an active role in spreading the false claim that an attacker who killed three girls in Southport was a "Muslim asylum seeker" who arrived in the UK, which started country-wide racist riots. |
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