Reporters Without Borders presses charges against X in France for spreading fake news

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has announced that it is pressing charges against the social media platform X over the dissemination of fake news and identity theft, according to a statement published this week. 

The nonprofit’s legal action comes after a fake video was spread by Russian authorities in mid-September.

The video falsely quoted an RSF report about the Ukrainian military and used the brand images of the BBC and RSF to spread misinformation. 

Widely shared by pro-Kremlin accounts, the video has been seen over 400,000 times. 

The nonprofit organisation also said that it had filed 10 reports of illegal content via the platform’s reporting system but that none of them resulted in the removal of defamatory content.

“X’s refusal to remove content that it knows is false and deceitful - as it was duly informed by RSF - makes it complicit in the spread of the disinformation circulating on its platform,” Antoine Bernard, RSF’s director of advocacy whose image was used in the fake news video, said in a statement.

“It’s time for X to be held accountable,” he added, qualifying pressing charges as “the last resort” against the proliferation of disinformation.

Under the Digital Services Act (DSA) which entered into force this year in the European Union, platforms with more than 45 million monthly users, must implement measures to counter the spread of misinformation. 

Another example of the crumbling trust in X?

The social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, has been increasingly criticised since Elon Musk acquired it in October 2022. 

The tech billionaire increasingly used his platform to post about the US elections, with Musk’s false or misleading posts amassing 2 billion views ahead of the poll, according to one analysis.

The British newspaper The Guardian said this week that “the benefits of being on X are now outweighed by the negatives” and announced that it would stop posting on the platform.

The daily Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia also announced a similar move this week.

At the same time, X’s competitor Bluesky has had more than one million users join it since the US election.