News broke this afternoon that Facebook has identified a private Israel-based influence campaign aimed at disrupting elections in various countries and has canceled dozens of accounts that engaged in spreading disinformation. Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, told reporters Thursday the tech giant had purged 65 accounts, 161 pages and dozens of groups.
Corin Imai, Senior Security Advisor at DomainTools:
“It is reassuring to see that tech giants are stepping up to protect the political discourse from disinformation campaigns.
Facebook is not new to controversies regarding its involvement in the spreading of fake news, which indeed flourish on the platform. Recently, however, the commitment to protect the democratic process seems to have intensified not only on the part of Facebook and WhatsApp, but also Twitter and other news and social media outlets.
Their efforts should be coupled with awareness-raising campaigns to warn users of the tell-tale signs of fake news, so as to contain the scale at which the fake stories get shared. Politically motivated disinformation campaigns on social media will continue to proliferate only so long as they’ll have an effect on public opinion, and an educated user-base is the how we can to stop that from happening.”
