LAHORE: Some news items, if not many, go unnoticed as we deal with information bombardment. With most of these reported form far away, we feel that they don’t concern us in Pakistan. However, it isn’t the case as we live in global village. And a latest Reuters report about Elon Musk and his X – social media platform – is one of such stories.
According to Reuters, a research organisation said on Wednesday that Musk’s X, formerly called Twitter, disabled a feature that let users report misinformation about elections, throwing fresh concern about false claims spreading just before major US and Australian votes.After introducing a feature in 2022 for users to report a post they considered misleading about politics, X in the past week removed the “politics” category from its drop-down menu in every jurisdiction but the European Union, said the researcher Reset.Tech Australia. Users could still report posts to X globally for a host of other complaints such as promoting violence or hate speech, the researcher added.
Removing a way for people to report suspected political misinformation may limit intervention at a time when social media platforms are under pressure to curtail falsehoods about electoral integrity, which have grown rapidly in recent years. It comes less than three weeks before Australia holds a referendum, its first in a quarter century, on whether to change the constitution to establish an Indigenous advisory body to parliament and 14 months before a US presidential election [please also add the polls in India which are also scheduled for next year]. –Agencies
