Platforms didn’t respond to half of the disinformation on EU elections, 75% in the case of YouTube

We have analyzed content debunked by independent fact-checking organizations from all across Europe involved in the Elections24Check project during the four months ahead of the elections, including Election Day. Over 40 EFCSN member contributed to the database. The content in this report covers a total of 1321 posts identified in 26 European countries, individually checked to assess if platforms had included warnings or had taken any other action.

These are the main results:

• Overall, 45% of the disinformation content received no visible action by the platforms, but each platform’s response rate varies, as did the particular moderation decisions
• YouTube took no visible action regarding 75% of disinformation content and, even in the cases where it did, in 80% of those it just displayed a generic information panel or labeled the source of the video as state media, offering no explanation of why the content itself was false. Some of those videos reached 500.000 views.
• X took no visible action in 70% of the cases and Community Notes were visible in only 15% of the posts already debunked by European fact-checkers. Among the 20 most viral debunked posts that received no action by the platforms, 18 were hosted in X with over 1,5 million views each.
• TikTok moderated 40% of the posts, Instagram 70%, and Facebook 88%. While the majority of Facebook actions regarding disinformation were fact-checking labels that kept the original content online and focused on adding context (77%), removal was TikTok’s most common moderation decision (32%).
• Across the relevant topics for the elections, the one in which platforms’ response was the least successful was disinformation targeting migrants (57% of the posts received no action) closely followed by disinformation about the integrity of the election (56%). Both YouTube and TikTok had a 0% response rate for disinformation targeting migrants.

The full report can be accessed here.