Facebook and Twitter Have Done Little against Disinformation Says EU

In the run-up to the European Union elections in May this year, EU officials have observed that despite several assurances to fight disinformation, IT giants like Facebook and Twitter are doing very little to scrutinize advertising placements on their sites and to fight disinformation.

In its second monthly report, which has been released recently, officials of the European Commission, which is the executive arm of European Union has said that the social media sites did not show what they had promised in January in order to check ad placements on its sites and check disinformation.

On the other hand, officials have found, Google though has offered data about their actions taken in the month of January to better study ad placements but did not provided any information regarding how they are tackling disinformation and checking of misleading advertising.

In a statement released by Andrus Ansip, Vice President of the Digital Single Market and other officials has said, “We urge Facebook, Google and Twitter to do more across all member states to help ensure the integrity of the European Parliament elections in May 2019. We also encourage platforms to strengthen their cooperation with fact-checkers and academic researchers to detect disinformation campaigns and make fact-checked content more visible and widespread”.

This January, European Commission has started issuing monthly reports on the performance of the Internet players about the promises and assurance they have provided last year to abide by the “code of practice” in order to fight disinformation.

But in the second report that was released by European Commission this week, Facebook topped the list for criticism. In the report, European Commission has observed that Facebook has not reported the results of its activities in January to inspect ad placement and also did not report the number of fake accounts it has claimed to have removed.

In the past, the social network has been accused of being used as one of the prominent platforms to spread rumors and misleading information, most notably during the 2016 US election that made Donald Trump the President of United States of America.

Also, the ads on Facebook have become the centre of the FBI’s investigation over Russia’s influence in the US election and the elections of other European countries. Russia, however, has repeatedly denied allegations of hacking and meddling in foreign elections through disinformation in the past.