Elon Musk’s X Will Give Blue Checks to Anyone, Even Terrorist Leaders | Leaders of Hezbollah, and other sanctioned groups, paid for premium features on Elon Musk's 'free speech' platform.

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 200 points – Elon Musk’s X Will Give Blue Checks to Anyone, Even Terrorist Leaders
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Elon Musk’s X Will Give Blue Checks to Anyone, Even Terrorist Leaders | Leaders of Hezbollah, and other sanctioned groups, paid for premium features on Elon Musk's 'free speech' platform.::Leaders of Hezbollah, and other sanctioned groups, paid for premium features on Elon Musk's 'free speech' platform.

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To be fair, would you really want to debate best waifus with an unverified terrorist leader on Twitter?

On the other hand X is banning accounts of farmer leaders in India who are protesting against the govt. So much for free speech?

Can a US company serve sanctioned groups?

Does it matter if nobody does anything about it?

I mean, this seems pretty easy to enforce. "Mr Musk, why is there a blue check mark next to a terrorist's X account? Are you doing business with sanctioned groups?" X isn't some international public service. Its a private US company subject to laws.

It's still dependent on someone actually doing it.

Of course they can, the US government allows free speach, they won't stop any US citizen saying anything.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Elon Musk’s “free speech” app, X, will give a platform to almost anyone, and that includes the leaders of terrorist groups.

Several leaders of Hezbollah, a designated terrorist group by the United States, are X Premium customers receiving paid services such as verification, boosted content, and longer posts, according to an investigation from the Tech Transparency Project (TTP) on Wednesday.

X, formerly Twitter, provided premium services to accounts belonging to Hezbollah’s leaders, as well as Iran-backed militants, Houthi Rebels, and Russian state media, according to the investigation.

Iranian state media, Press TV, was identified as having a gold check mark in the Tech Transparency Project’s investigation.

The incident is reminiscent of Media Matter’s investigation into X, which found anti-semitic content appearing next to Disney, IBM, and Apple’s ads.

X says some accounts listed by the Tech Transparency Project “may have visible check marks without receiving any services that would be subject to sanctions.”

The original article contains 551 words, the summary contains 153 words. Saved 72%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Yeah, that's exactly the point. They just indicate if you've paid for premium.