Much like it did before the elections in France Sunday, Facebook is taking steps to curb fake news and delete fake accounts prior to the upcoming elections in the U.K. (Adweek)
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. (NYT)
The company, which has more than 31 million accounts registered in Britain, is also launching a fact-checking initiative and said it will stop promoting posts that show signs of being implausible. (The Guardian)
The platform also said it had already removed “tens of thousands” of fake Facebook accounts and that systems were now monitoring the repeated posting of the same content or a sharp increase in messaging. Accounts displaying this activity are then flagged, it added. (BBC News)
Facebook has spent the past few months trying to clean up its fake news mess by employing technological tools, a streamlined reporting process, and disrupting the economic incentives (advertising money) purveyors of fake news were collecting. Last month, weeks before the French presidential election, Facebook shut down 30,000 fake accounts that had been spreading hoax stories. (NBC News)