Is fake news at all-time high thanks to X blue tick policy?

A journalist at BBC Verify has claimed that "Twitter Blue", now known as X Premium, has led to an influx in fake news and misinformation.

"I've been fact-checking on Twitter for years, and there's always plenty of misinformation during major events", Shayan Sardarizadeh wrote on Twitter/X. "But the deluge of false posts in the last two days, many boosted via Twitter Blue, is something else.

"Neither fact checkers nor Community Notes can keep up with this."

Answering a comment about why misinformation has become so rife on the platform, he said "engagement, influence and now money", in reference to the ad revenue sharing program and monetisation system launched under Elon Musk's X Premium, where users have the opportunity to make money off of posts with high engagement.

Sardarizadeh's claim is inline with the European Union's announcement in September that X/Twitter is the biggest source of fake news.

X/Twitter claim to "limit amplification of misleading content or remove it from X if offline consequences could be immediate and severe".

But Musk's removal of the blue checkmark, now making the feature available to any user if they subscribe to X Premium, is perhaps the biggest stripping of X/Twitter's anti-disinformation features. As seen countless times, it is now easier for users to impersonate notable figures or brands, allowing for misinformation to spread at a much quicker rate, and making it harder for users to discern what is true and what is not.

Musk has long faced backlash for his decisions in regards to X/Twitter since he took over the company, especially his rollback of disinformation policies, but criticism has ramped up again in wake of the Palestine-Israel conflict.

Countless false information has circulated across X/Twitter in regards to the latest developments, and Sardarizadeh has been highlighting misinformation throughout:

Indy100 has reached out to X/Twitter for comment.

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