SpaceX, Twitter and electric car maker Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends an event during the Vivatech technology startups and innovation fair at the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, on June 16, 2023. A NewsGuard report has observed an uptick in state media propagation after Elon Musk bought and acquired Twitter and before he rebranded it as X.
Prior to Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, accounts of news agencies that were "state affiliated" were labeled such as to highlight potential government bias, disinformation, and propaganda. After Musk took over and rebranded it into X, the labeling process was removed.
In the aftermath, a new research report by media analysis firm NewsGuard suggested that user engagement with foreign propaganda skyrocketed since the Tesla and SpaceX boss took over.
NewsGuard: Removing 'State Affiliated' Label Means Uptick in Propaganda Engagement
The study claimed that sites like Russia's RT and TASS, China's Global Times and China Daily, and Iran's PressTV have seen huge upticks in user engagement over the last several months. In the 90 days after X removed the "state affiliated" labels, engagement with posts from English-language versions of their accounts increased by 70%.
Out of all state media accounts, the study found that Russian state media Russia Today (RT) gained the most engagement since X removed the labeling, removing alongside it the information that the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin is operating it. This multiplied its engagement to 2.5 million likes and reposts from 1.3 million after the removal of the disclosure. TASS, another Russian state media outlet, also grew its engagement by 63% post-Musk takeover.
The same trend was also observed for PressTV (97%) and the Global Times (26%).
On the other hand, Gizmodo emphasized that the US government officially accused many of the organizations mentioned as propaganda outlets despite some previously disavowing claims they lacked editorial independence. There was also a broader argument over what exactly counted as "state affiliated" media.
No matter the labeling or the refusal of such, media outlets that received public funding have long been accused of being mouthpieces for the governments funding them.
Algorithm Assist
NewsGuard also reported that X's own algorithm appeared to be amplifying content posted by state media, which, in turn, created a larger audience for it.
It could be remembered that content from accounts the site deemed as "state affiliated" media could never be boosted by its algorithm. When Musk took over, stories from such state media were algorithmically recommended in users' "For You" feeds with some regularity.
NewsGuard Analyst Jack Brewster told Gizmodo that the post-Musk site gave readers much less information about the sources where the news was taken from and that the site's recently-tweaked information filtering processes have had a substantial effect on how disinformation is being propagated on the platform.
From Complicated to Confusing
Musk was not the only culprit for the disinformation issues Twitter/X had, as it has always been a place where propaganda is mostly delivered by everyday users, from government agencies to political operatives to celebrities to contractors, as well as an army of bots and trolls.
It also recently came to light that, in the years prior to the rollout of state-affiliated media labels, Twitter assisted in amplifying US propaganda efforts in the Middle East.
The media labeling policy Musk ditched was also a problem in itself, as the state-affiliated label was given to the US's geopolitical adversaries but not to Western outlets, such as Radio Free Europe or Voice of America.
But no matter how flimsy the guardrails were designed to combat a certain amount of information pollution on the platform, Brewster acknowledged the guardrails were designed to combat a certain amount of information pollution on the platform.
Related Article: EU Accuses Elon Musk's X of Allowing Russian Disinformation in Platform
