Tag Archives: fakenews
Facebook removes fake accounts stoking political tension in UK
Facebook just cracked down on more fake accounts in the UK, and this time it was a relatively sophisticated scheme. The social network has pulled 137 bogus accounts (including for Instagram), groups and pages for "coordinated inauthentic behavior" t...
Facebook reportedly took three years to tackle fake news in one country
Facebook is quick to tout its efforts to thwart misinformation campaigns in major European countries and the US, but its approach in other countries might not be quite so enthusiastic. Developers in Moldova told BuzzFeed News that they'd been asking...
AI can write disturbingly believable fake news
AI is getting better and better at writing convincing material, and that's leading its creators to wonder whether they should release the technology in the first place. Elon Musk's OpenAI has developed an algorithm that can generate plausible-looking...
WhatsApp deletes 2 million accounts per month to curb fake news
WhatsApp is trying a number of measures to fight its fake news problem, including study grants, a grievance officer and labels on forwarded messages. However, it's also relying on a comparatively old-fashioned approach: outright deleting accounts. Th...
Don’t trust all of those health articles you see in your Facebook feed
Facebook's battle with fake news stories goes beyond the world of politics. According to fact-checking site Health Feedback, seven of the 10 most shared health stories on Facebook in 2018 contained false or misleading information. The top 100 stories...
Twitter banned 2,600 Iran-linked accounts for election meddling
Since September, Twitter has suspended 2,617 accounts linked to Iran, it said in a report on its US midterm election efforts. Some of the accounts claimed they were American news outlets and discussed US political and social issues. Twitter claims it...
Microsoft’s mobile Edge browser begins issuing fake news warnings
Microsoft's Edge mobile browser has started flagging fake news sites as part of its latest update for iOS and Android. Previously only available as a desktop plug-in, the feature is powered by news rating company NewsGuard -- which makes a point of u...
WhatsApp limits forwarding worldwide to fight hoaxes and rumors
WhatsApp limited forwarding in India as part of an effort to curb hoaxes and rumors that could lead to violence, and now that policy is spreading. The Facebook-owned messaging service has announced that it's lowering the forwarding limit worldwide f...
Facebook purges more than 500 Russian-led disinformation pages
"Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior" is such an anodyne way of describing weaponizing information to poison attitudes and democracies. That's the euphemism that Facebook is employing to talk about its latest purge of accounts and pages that may be part...