One the top social media Platform Facebook has closed down 23 Italian pages, including many supporting the country’s government parties fake news spreading and breaking other social network rules and regulations..
coming in the middle of renewed concerns that fake news could poison the campaign for the May 26 European Parliament elections coming up, was taken in response to an investigation by Avaaz, a global campaigning group.
a Facebook spokesman said in a statement.“We have removed a number of fake and duplicate accounts that were violating our authenticity policies, as well as multiple pages for name change,”
he further added: “We also took action against some additional pages that repeatedly posted misinformation. We will take further action if we find additional violations,.”
The report appreciate Avaaz for flagging up its concerns and said Facebook was “focused on protecting the integrity of elections across the EU and around the world.’’
According Avaaz, the pages that were closed down had a total of 2.46 million followers and used to spread false news or divisive messages against migrants,Jews and vaccines
without warning viewers that it was a scene of a film, One of them shared a video of migrants smashing a police car. The video has attracted almost 10 million views, Avaaz said. Other groups changed their names secretly to support the far-right union of deputy premier Matteo Salvini or its coalition ally, the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S).
for example, One pro-M5S political page was originally taaged “Sexy Bombs”, and another one supporting Salvini first attracted followers with “The worst of Big Brother 2018”.
As at 2016 according facebook “The vast majority of Facebook users in our data did not share any articles from fake news domains in 2016 at all,”. Furthermore, “this is not because people generally do not share links:
While 3.4% of respondents for whom we have Facebook profile data shared 10 or fewer links of any kind, 310 (26.1%) respondents shared 10 to 100 links during the period of data collection and 729 (61.3%) respondents shared 100 to 1000 links.”
Among respondents for whom they had the appropriate data, only 8.5 percent shared any fake news pieces.
