Sad! Majority Of Hoax Spreaders From Blue Centrang Accounts

Illustration X (Photo: @lindayaX)

JAKARTA - Disinformation and hoaxes are very serious issues for platform X, formerly Twitter. However, X doesn't seem to realize that this issue also arises from the freedom of a blue tick account.

NewsGuard, a non-profit organization that eradicates disinformation, conducted recent research. They stated that the biggest disinformation contributor on X is a Premium X user with a blue tick.

This fact is actually surprising, but not surprising. The reason is, X provides users with easy access to blue ticks. They only need to pay 8 US dollars (IDR 127 thousand) per month.

In fact, before Elon Musk took the lead, Twitter focused on giving blue ticks to celebrities, politicians and journalists. People with this profession don't need to buy to get a blue tick.

NewsGuard has analyzed 250 disinformation posts on platform X within a week. Of all the uploads that share information about war, 74 percent of the uploads were spread by blue ticked accounts.

Concernedly, these 250 uploads have more than 100 million views and 1,349,979 engagements calculated from likes, re-posts, comments, andmark features.

This high number of views and interactions is of course due to the advantage of the blue tick, which is an increase in reach. These accounts have improved algorithms so that their uploads are very easy to go viral.

NewsGuard says that a blue tick can be a good improvement, but it can also be a crucial thing. With evidence of a blue tick account as the highest disinformation spreader, NewsGuard strongly criticizes X's blue tick policy.

Meanwhile, platform X continues to promote the use of the Community Records feature. However, of the 250 uploads that NewsGuard researched, only 79 were tagged as disinformation content with Notes.

Seeing the lack of use of Notes on disinformation content, NewsGuard said that Community Records nearly 70 percent failed to straighten out disinformation content.