By Thomas Escritt
BERLIN (Reuters) -Elon Musk’s social media platform X must release information enabling researchers to track the spread of election-swaying information on the network, a German court ruled on Friday.
The Berlin district court issued its ruling in response to an urgent filing brought earlier this week by two civil rights groups who said they need the data to let them track misinformation and disinformation ahead of Germany’s February 23 national election.
“Waiting any longer for access to the data would undermine the applicants’ research project since the period immediately before the election is crucial,” the court said in a ruling seen by Reuters.
X had not responded to a court request for information, the court added, ordering the company to bear the 6,000 euro ($6,200) cost of proceedings.
“This is a huge success for freedom to research and for our democracy,” said Simone Ruf, a lawyer at the German Society for Civil Rights (GFF), one of the plaintiffs.
X did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The GFF and Democracy Reporting International had argued that X had a duty under European law to provide easily researchable, collated access to information such as post reach, shares and likes – information theoretically available by laboriously clicking through thousands of posts but in practice impossible to access.
The ruling obliges X to make the data available from now until shortly after the election.
The spread of misinformation and disinformation on X is of particular interest given its owner’s endorsement of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), running second in the polls behind the conservatives.
“Only the AfD can save Germany,” Tesla mogul and Trump confidante Musk posted in January before conducting a live interview with the party’s leader Alice Weidel.
($1 = 0.9651 euros)
(Reporting by Thomas Escritt Editing by Hugh Lawson and Mark Potter)
