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?

[Notabadguy]

None of that is true. CNN did not attempt to shape the elections. They reported facts. You just don't like the facts.

Perhaps you should research the CNN blackout of Bernie Sanders to promote Hillary Clinton.

Or the CNN clip telling its viewers that it's illegal to read the wikileaks e-mail, and that we're only allowed to get information parsed through CNN. Here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Or perhaps the January fiasco where CNN got themselves labeled fake news (again) by reporting that Russia had compromising personal and financial information leashing Trump? You know, the stuff no one else would publish?

You could google "CNN Fake news" or "CNN controversies" if you were really interested in seeing whether CNN is really just a fact reporting organization or not. I don't think you will though; your opinion is your opinion at this stage in your life, and rather than searching for facts, you search for spin that supports your view.

Re:Fact checking?

[Mashiki]

I guess that's why they had so many cases where people were suddenly "cut off" when they started talking about things that CNN considered forbidden. And they did so, so many times that it became a meme. As for CNN trying to shape the election? Remember their reporters(along with politico, nbc, and several other publications) getting caught sending drafts to the DNC? Then there were the other cases where they directly published stuff from the DNC. You can find those both in the wikileaks dumps. Then there was the case where someone under their employ(Donna Brazile) fed Clinton debate questions. Oh you bet your ass they tried to shape the election and got caught doing it.

The US on the other hand, interfered with so many European elections that it's scary. And Russian elections, and in Canadian elections, and Israeli, and, and, and, and....

Hey did you catch that bit about the Steele thing? You know where they're refusing to answer any questions regarding it to the senate intelligence committee? No? That's okay. It's not like something doesn't stink there.

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."

Re:Fact checking?

[Crashmarik]

I notice people who have a beef with Fox never mention specific incidents for some reason.

The people who don't like CNN, on the other hand, have specifics, whats more they have the reporters donating to and working for the candidates they cover.

But speaking of long term vendettas in the news, somehow those people who don't like Fox seem to forget Dan Rather as the head of CBS news, George Stephanopulous at ABC, or that entire joke of a network MSNBC