Facebook is taking its battle against fake news to Britain ahead of general elections next month.
The social network published a series of advertisements in newspapers in Britain on Monday, giving advice to its millions of users in the country on how to spot misinformation online. It also said it had removed tens of thousands of possibly fake accounts in Britain, and had tweaked its algorithms in the country to reduce the amount of misinformation and spam that people will see in their Facebook news feeds.
Despite the Silicon Valley giant’s increased efforts to clamp down on how misinformation is spread, policy makers, journalists and others in Europe remain skeptical about the ability of Facebook and other technology companies to fight such digital falsities.
Some politicians in the region have already called for hefty fines against social media networks when they fail to police false reports and hate speech online. And several European publishers have balked at participating in Facebook’s fact-checking efforts, saying it is the company’s responsibility — not theirs — to determine what is false or misleading.
“Facebook must recognize that it alone will remain responsible for what happens on its platform,” Gruner + Jahr, a German publisher, said in February when it declined to help Facebook with its fact-checking initiatives. “Facebook must be prepared to immediately prevent the dissemination of news that has been clearly identified as untrue.”
Facebook’s latest campaign in Britain comes after vocal criticism of the network’s role in spreading false information during the 2016 American presidential election, as well as during a series of elections in Europe this year.
The company has sought to clamp down on how outright fake news sites could make money from advertising on its network, and it introduced fact-checking initiatives in Europe before recent votes in the Netherlands and in France, and coming ones in Britain and Germany.
Last week, Facebook said it would hire 3,000 more moderators, almost doubling the number of people worldwide who scan for inappropriate or offensive content, especially in the live videos it is encouraging people to broadcast.
The steps come as tech companies and data scientists are turning to artificial intelligence and other high-tech wizardry to try to combat the spread of fake news online, including automatically fact-checking statements in real time. FullFact and Factmata, two British organizations, are planning to test such programs before the general election on June 8. “People want to see accurate information on Facebook,” Simon Milner, the company’s policy director for the United Kingdom, said in a statement on Monday. “That is why we are doing everything we can to tackle the problem of false news.”
Facebook’s latest efforts in Britain, experts say, are part of its strategy to appease regulators, many of which want the company to comply with regulations on the media that could affect its growth.
The account deletions announced on Monday comprised a relatively small figure compared with the tens of millions of British users. The company’s account removals focused specifically on automated accounts, among others, that have spread misinformation. Facebook had employed a similar strategy in France before the second round of that country’s presidential election on Sunday.
Facebook, however, says that it is merely a digital platform, and that it should not be forced to police people’s political opinions online.
While Twitter has made its user data mostly freely available to researchers, to determine how misinformation spreads online, Facebook has not, saying that doing so would infringe on privacy online.
Campaigners against false information say that without data on people’s activity on Facebook, it remains difficult — if not impossible — to create tools to tackle the growing rise of fake reports online.
“There’s significantly more that Facebook could be doing,” said Claire Wardle, research director at First Draft News, a nonprofit organisation that has teamed up with tech companies and newsrooms to debunk fake reports about elections in the United States and Europe. “They know more about people’s online activities than anyone else. They know what goes on within their platform.”
©2017 The New York Times News Service