14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook is taking its fight against fake news seriously, it seems. After releasing a number of tools to help fight against this plague, the company took a more proactive approach and took down some 30,000 fake accounts linked to France ahead of the presidential elections.
According to a statement released by the company, Facebook is 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."
The company explained in a blog post that there have been many changes brought to the platform lately, including some that run "under the hood." Some additional improvements that were recently made help detect fake accounts on Facebook more effectively, including those that are hard to spot.
"We've made improvements to recognize these inauthentic accounts more easily by identifying patterns of activity - without assessing the content itself. For example, our systems may detect repeated posting of the same content, or an increase in messages sent," the company explains.
Facebook admits that these changes will not result in the removal of every fake account, but as time goes by, the effectiveness will grow. Their priority, for now, is to remove the accounts with the largest footprint, with a high amount of activity and a broad reach.
The game is on
For its part, Facebook seems to be putting in a lot of work to stop the distribution of misinformation, as the company puts it, as well as spam and false news. "We've found that a lot of false news is financially motivated, and as part of our work to promote an informed society, we have focused on making it very difficult for dishonest people to exploit our platform or profit financially from false news sites using Facebook."
In the past few weeks, Facebook has released a list of tips to help users spot fake news, and has signed up for the News Integrity Initiative.
Recently, World Wide Web creator Sir Tim Berners-Lee has said that Facebook and Google have a lot to do to tackle this problem and, unfortunately for them, they're the ones that should do it because so many people use them. Both companies have done a lot to this extent and will continue to work in this direction.