Twitter, Google's YouTube, Facebook, Meta Platform's LinkedIn, and Microsoft's TikTok are not doing enough to remove fake news from their platforms, which raises doubts about their ability to comply with new EU online content rules, according to an activist non-governmental organisation called Avaaz. TikTok is also not doing enough to remove fake news from its platform.

This week, businesses are required to report on the steps they have taken to adhere to the new EU code of conduct on disinformation, which is connected to the laws governing online material known as the Digital Services Act (DSA), which went into effect in November.

Avaaz claimed it examined 108 fact-checked pieces of content relating to a 2022 anti-vaccine film in the United States and discovered that efforts by social media sites, including Meta's Instagram, to delete false information fell short.

According to the organisation, only 22% of the disinformation content that Avaaz analysed has been labelled or taken down by the six major platforms.

According to the report, the corporations did not do enough to combat misinformation in tongues other than English.

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'Our analysis discovered that in some EU languages - Italian, German, Hungarian, Danish, Spanish and Estonian - no platform took any action against breaching posts,' Avaaz stated. 'This is despite explicit platform obligations in the code to improve their services in all EU languages.'

According to this survey, the group claimed that most main platforms do not abide by their Code of Practice pledges and may violate forthcoming DSA duties.

After adhering to the revised EU regulation, Meta, Alphabet, Twitter, and Microsoft pledged to take a firmer stance against misinformation last year.

For DSA infractions, businesses risk fines of up to 6% of their global sales.

The Twitter software is stuck.

According to a Reuters story, the company's approach to complying with future regulations in Europe has been called into question by the stalling of a Twitter programme that was essential for outside researchers examining disinformation efforts.

In June, Twitter and the EU inked a voluntary agreement relating to the DSA in which Twitter pledged to 'empower the research community' by, among other things, providing datasets about disinformation to researchers.

The Twitter Moderation Research Consortium, which gathered information on state-backed manipulation of the network and made it available to researchers, was a crucial component of Twitter's strategy to achieve that, according to Yoel Roth, former head of trust and safety at Twitter.

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He claimed that Twitter was 'uniquely well-positioned.'

According to Roth, who quit in November, and three other former employees involved in the programme, nearly all of the 10 to 15 employees who worked on the consortium have departed the company since Elon Musk's takeover in October.

Before the law's full implementation in early 2024, the new Digital Services Act (DSA), one of the world's most robust internet platform rules, requires digital companies to have measures in place against illegal content and explain the actions they take for content moderation.