Twitter is your best source for disinformation

Fake News!

If you are big into fake news, or just being generally misinformed, apparently Twitter is your best source to get all worked up about nothing. It's probably not too much of a surprise that Twitter has its issues with spam bots and extremists, but I could have sworn that Facebook might have even been worse (just because of the much larger audience). 

In the end most social media networks are hugely susceptible to people putting up fake or untrue content to either drive more clicks or to push forward their views. 

What's the solution? It's obviously not so simple, but Motherboard takes a closer look at the world of misinformation on Twitter.

Twitter is the most open social media platform, which is partly why it's used by so many politicians, celebrities, journalists, tech types, conference goers, and experts working on fast-moving topics. As we learned over the past year, Twitter's openness was exploited by adversarial governments trying to influence elections. Twitter is marketing itself as a news platform, the go-to place to find out, in the words of its slogan, "What's happening?"

So what's happening with disinformation on Twitter? That is very hard to tell, because Twitter is actively making it easier to hide evidence of wrongdoing and making it harder to investigate abuse by limiting and monitoring third party research, and by forcing data companies to delete evidence as requested by users. The San Francisco-based firm has long been the platform of choice for adversarial intelligence agencies, malicious automated accounts (so-called bots), and extremists at the fringes. Driven by ideology and the market, the most open and liberal social media platform has become a threat to open and liberal democracy.