News comes after EU says platform formerly known as Twitter has highest disinformation of social networks surveyed

Elon Musk, owner of X, has confirmed he has ditched his team working to prevent disruption to elections, just days after the EU announced the platform, formerly known as Twitter, had the highest proportion of disinformation in three European countries .

Ahead of 70 elections around the globe in the coming year, the controversial businessman confirmed on X : “Oh you mean the ‘Election Integrity’ Team that was undermining election integrity? Yeah, they’re gone.”

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Durham University researchers also found novelty backgrounds lowered perceptions of trust and competency

People who curate the backdrop of their video calls to appear well-read may be vindicated for their trouble, as research has found that bookshelves or plants make the best impression in an online meeting.

In contrast, anyone wanting to spice things up with a novelty background should think again, as researchers from Durham University’s psychology department have found this makes people less likely to think those they are watching are trustworthy or competent.

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Almost no stone has been left unturned in the coverage of the fallout from the Dispatches special, Russell Brand: In Plain Sight. But thus far no one seems to have picked up on one of the odder tales: Ed Balls claiming that he could have saved Ed Miliband from teaming up with Brand at the 2015 general election .

“In the very beginning of January 2015, rather out of the blue, Russell Brand, on a Channel 4 quiz decided to call me a clicky-wristed, snidey C-word,” said Balls on last week’s episode of Political Currency , the podcast he co-hosts with former opponent George Osborne. “You will be unsurprised to know that Russell Brand didn’t say ‘C-word’. He just said the C-word.”

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ChatGPT ne sera désormais plus dépassé. Le chatbot est en train d'être connecté à Internet, ce qui lui permettra d'accéder à des informations bien plus récentes. Une bonne nouvelle pour les internautes se servant du chatbot, qui risquait le déclassement. [Lire la suite]

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The EU report cards are in, and they must address the fact that one platform is falling far behind others in dealing with misinformation

Results days for A-levels and GCSEs see pupils across the UK waiting with no small measure of anxiety for their grades. Big tech CEOs are having a similar experience this week, as the European Union announces the results of reports submitted by tech firms on the scale of fake news across social media. The reports were the first since the Digital Services Act gave the EU sweeping new powers to fine and otherwise punish those who perform poorly.

The report cards were welcome reading for most companies, who have done decently in tackling the scourge of disinformation. But for Elon Musk’s Twitter , now known as X, the message was clear: “Could do better.”

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Which? survey suggests ‘unscrupulous’ sellers bombard customers with incentives

As many as one in 10 Amazon shoppers could have been offered a “bribe” in exchange for a positive review of a product in the past year, research from the UK consumer body Which? suggests.

The organisation claimed that unscrupulous sellers on Amazon were “bombarding customers” with incentives such as gift cards, free products and refunds “in order to cheat the system”. Amazon said in response that it had “clear policies that prohibit reviews abuse”.

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We only loved non-fungible tokens – now all but worthless – during a pandemic peak of online loneliness. What will the next craze look like?

With last week’s report that 95% of them are now worthless , I think it’s just about safe to say that the NFT moment is finally over. Phew. There really was a six-week period at the start of last year when I thought I was going to have to attach my digital soul for ever to a really bad picture of a monkey with a tentacle coming out of its nose and mouth. I kept practising saying, “No, it’s actually quite cool! It’s good. And it only cost me about as much as a car!” in the mirror a lot, with a ghoulish rictus grin.

NFT, as was probably explained to you hundreds of times in the period from January 2021 to about May 2022, stands for “non-fungible token”, and essentially means that you can buy a code that says you own a digital asset, which is then stored on the blockchain , a sort of centralised public transaction ledger. There was a lot of hyped future uses for this technology, but for the most part it was used to buy jpegs of monkeys , or maybe sometimes a lion.

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The format was made a phenomenon by women, but now you can hardly hear them – unless they’re discussing their husbands

I went to an event last week, Is Audio the Future?, which left me full of enthusiasm for podcasts as this pure, organic, guerrilla space, which nobody had yet figured out how to gatekeep and thereby homogenise. Chris Sweeney described how his podcast, Homo Sapiens, originally co-hosted with Will Young, came about in 2018: he was an avid fan of Woman’s Hour and thought, “Wouldn’t it be great to have an LGBT Woman’s Hour?” They started with no more equipment than an iPhone. Holly Cook, head of product at the Economist, described readers having a much richer relationship with the content when they became listeners, more intimate and proprietorial. It reminded me of publishing, in the old days, when there were low barriers to entry, a thousand flowers could bloom and not everyone in the business was in an unengaging steeplechase for the next Hogwarts.

But actually, that would have been publishing in the 17th century. A much better analogy for podcasts as they are now, or as I thought they were, would be the early days of the internet, without behemoths, advertisers or algorithms, before users were funnelled in one of four directions (violent misogynists, conspiracists and white-supremacists; mild lefties; consumers; people who like cats).

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

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Musk’s X platform found to have highest proportion of disinformation posts among large social media players

The EU has issued a warning to Elon Musk to comply with sweeping new laws on fake news and Russian propaganda, after X, formerly known as Twitter, was found to have the highest ratio of disinformation posts of all large social media platforms.

Facebook was the second worst offender, according to the first ever report recording posts that will be deemed illegal across the EU under the Digital Services Act (DSA), which came into force in August.

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