On Thursday, social networking site Facebook announced that it had removed more than 137 fake pages, groups, as well as Instagram accounts in the UK and 31 in Romania for being involved in hate speech and for making hateful comments on the platform. For quite a while now, Internet organizations such as Facebook, Twitter, Google has been scrutinized by regulators around the world to tackle the matter of propaganda campaigns that are targeted at influencing elections by spreading disinformation.
Crackdown on anti-vaccination news
Facebook has also recently put out an official statement promising to tackle the issue of wrong information circulating out on the platform regarding vaccination by significantly reducing the distribution of such type of content and offering users reliable and trusted information on the matter.
The social network giant has plans to put a definitive end to disinformation on the platform in terms of vaccination news by making sure that the groups and pages that are involved in such illegal practices are ranked absolutely nowhere in its news feed as well as search features. The firm is also thinking of rejecting ads that are distributing such information.
Reducing hate speech and fake news
According to Reuters, Facebook's head of cybercrime policy, Nathaniel Gleicher stated in a blog post that the people responsible for running these fake pages, groups, and accounts view themselves as anti-far-right activists in the United Kingdom. Most of the famous pages that were removed as a part of Facebook's worldwide initiative to substantially reduce hate speech on the platform mainly highlighted the part of the Muslim community in Britain.
The pages constantly promoted unfriendly content related to Tommy Robinson, who was the erstwhile leader of the extremist group English Defense League popularly known as EDL.
Facebook has been working for a while now with DMR, a small online forensics team based in Washington for enhancing its ability to investigate the interferences of foreign establishments.
Around the time of last month, literally more than hundreds of Indonesia-based accounts, pages and groups were taken down by Facebook after finding out that they were tied to a famous online group popularly known for propagating hate speech and false news.
In Romania, most of the people that are operating such groups, pages or accounts usually post about the basic general stuff such as political news that is normally in support of the Social Democratic Party also known as PSD.
