Foreign propaganda accounts aiming to influence US elections are flourishing on X, which no longer attends biweekly info-sharing meetings with social platforms
X hasn't sent a representative in months to biweekly information-sharing meetings with other social media companies Mastodon: @aaronjschaffer@mastodon … . X: @thedragonfeeder Mastodon: Aaron Schaffer / @aaronjschaffer@mastodon.social : New story by @JosephMenn, @NaomiNix, Clara Ence Morse and I about foreign influence operations on X. — Please read if you can. Gift link: https://wapo.st/3T4I0GI X: Chris Fenton / @thedragonfeeder : TikTok mentioned zero times in this article... Propaganda accounts found by Meta still flourish on X - The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
Context & Ripple Effects
The report extends a longer record of organized influence activity on major social platforms, including an investigation into China's use of private contractors for social-media propaganda and an EU finding that Kremlin-backed accounts had expanded their reach despite platform safeguards. It matters because cross-platform information sharing is one of the few mechanisms for connecting coordinated campaigns that appear across services.
Later coverage in this corpus also describes X as a politically engaged venue, with political insiders and candidates continuing to use the platform, making gaps in its participation in integrity coordination consequential beyond any single account takedown.
First-order effects
- X's absence from the biweekly meetings removes a direct channel through which other platforms can share timely intelligence about suspected foreign influence activity with X.
- Foreign propaganda accounts identified as targeting US elections can remain active on X while Meta and other participating services have less ability to coordinate a cross-platform response.
Second-order effects
- Participating platforms and researchers may have to rely more on public reporting, independent investigation, or bilateral outreach to trace coordinated campaigns that include X.
- The divergence in enforcement and information sharing can make X a more persistent distribution point for material removed or constrained elsewhere, particularly for politically focused users.
Third-order effects
- If major platforms opt out of shared integrity infrastructure, election-security efforts become fragmented: coordinated operators can exploit the weakest link rather than face a unified response.
- The pattern points toward a more uneven governance model in which platform-level moderation choices shape the effectiveness of collective defenses against foreign influence operations.
The trend: This is one data point in the fragmentation of cross-platform trust-and-safety coordination as politically important social networks adopt increasingly divergent governance approaches.