Facebook Targets 30,000 Fake France Accounts Before Election (go.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ABC News: Facebook says it has targeted 30,000 fake accounts linked to France ahead of the country's presidential election, as part of a worldwide effort against misinformation. The company said Thursday it's trying to "reduce the spread of material generated through inauthentic activity, including spam, misinformation, or other deceptive content that is often shared by creators of fake accounts." It said its efforts "enabled us to take action" against the French accounts and that it is removing sites with the highest traffic. Facebook and French media are also running fact-checking programs in France to combat misleading information, especially around the campaign for the two-round April 23-May 7 presidential election. European authorities have also pressured Facebook and Twitter to remove extremist propaganda or other postings that violate European hate speech or other laws.

Comments

Fact checking?

[guruevi]

Sounds more like shaping the message they want you to hear.

We all know how well "fact checking" and poll massaging CNN and Politifact were doing prior to the elections in an attempt to shape the election and it backfired.

Even if the content is considered fringe to the MSM, repressing it usually has the opposite effect, it only confirms the persecution complex of those fringe groups.

Re:Fact checking?

[admin7087]

As incomprehensible as this may appear to some people, there are facts and it's also very easy to get down to them and discern real news from false news and its way worse cousin fake news. If some alleged news does not withstand repeated scrutinity from various different news organizations, including professional ones, and if it is not taken up by many different sources including professional ones, then it's most likely false news and might also be fake news. (The latter is even easier to spot for anyone but the mentally deranged, but see the comment below.) As for "fringe content", that is reported by news agencies every day, if you're interested in local traffic accidents, curious or funny anecdotes, etc. you should get a subscriptions to AP, Reuters, etc.

If some news is repeated by many different newspapers and TV channels, that's a good sign, because there is only one reality.

The people who think there are multiple realities are confused, they confuse opinions and editorial comments with facts and have chosen bad and unreliable sources (news aggregator sites, for instance). In my experience a principle from sound engineering describes very well what's going on when people start to get confused, babble about social constructivism or 'alternative facts': Garbage in, garbage out. If you get your 'news' primarily from Facebook, that's too bad for you.

Re:Fact checking?

[Anonymous Coward]

> and if it is not taken up by many different sources including professional ones, then it's most likely false news and might also be fake news.

The fakers are well aware of this. They've taken two steps to compensate:

(1) Construct an alternate media ecosystem with hundreds of news sources with the full range of national-enquirer level to very professional looking sites
(2) Constantly bang away at every error, no matter the scope, made by professional news sources. Hold them to unreasonable standards (standards that they can't even hope of meeting themselves) in order to de-legitimize those sources in the minds of people looking for excuses to dismiss them.

These facebook accounts are part of #1, often they are feeders meant to channel people into the websites of this alternate ecosystem.

Ultimately it comes down to people choosing to uncritically believe articles that confirm their biases. Its as if a whole segment of the population never learned the proverb that "If its too good to be true, it probably is."

Fake = Conservative

[sproketboy]

Apparently.