Twitter hasn’t shed all the light that ARCOM would have liked on its fight against misinformation. The French regulator particularly criticizes the group for its prudishness when it comes to explaining precisely how its automation tools work.
A month after the purchase of the platform by Elon Musk and the dismissal of a substantial part of its workforce (including in our latitudes, in particular with the departure of Damien Viel, general manager of Twitter France), the firm is the subject clear remonstrances from the French regulator. We thus learn that Twitter lacks transparency in its fight against misinformation.
Twitter not quite clear
In a third annual report dealing precisely with this subject, entitled The fight against the manipulation of information, ARCOM shoots Twitter in good and due form. The institution emphasizes, among other things, the ” very low data transparency ” of the group. As Reuters reports, the French regulatory authority for audiovisual and digital content (resulting from the merger between the CSA and Hadopi) also judges ” imprecise » details provided by the network on the operation of its automation tools.
Contacted by the British press agency, Twitter France did not comment. We also learn that the French subsidiary has systematically used radio silence since the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk at the end of October.
That said, ARCOM explains that it is far from being the worst platform when it comes to transparency. ” TikTok, Yahoo and, to a lesser extent, Google stand out in particular for the absence of tangible information allowing ARCOM to measure the effectiveness of the measures put in place to contain online disinformation, explains the regulator.
The powerless ARCOM?
Still, faced with Twitter and other Web giants, ARCOM seems powerless. The tricolor organization does not benefit from any mandate allowing it to impose sanctions on platforms that do not fight sufficiently against the sharing of false information. On the other hand, it can publicly denounce the lack of goodwill of these companies… and that is precisely what it is doing with Twitter.
It should be noted that the blue bird network and a dozen other platforms (including YouTube, Wikipedia, Facebook and even TikTok) are nevertheless required by French legislation to reveal what measures they are putting in place to stem the spread of fake news. They are also required to provide their users with the means to report false information that could change the potential outcome of an election, Reuters said.
Source : Reuters
5