The European Commission has accused Facebook and other social media platforms of providing a misleading picture about their efforts of removing fake accounts that spread politically motivated disinformation. Julian King, the security commissioner had received the self-assessment reports published by the websites and stated that there was a ‘disconnect’ between the claims that the social media companies had made about their progress and the ‘lived experience’. The founder and chief executive officer of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg recently appeared before a US Senate Committee looking at disinformation and gave evidence. According to the social media giant, they have disabled about 2.2 million fake accounts in the first quarter of 2019.
Moreover, they also claimed to have removed 7,600 pages, accounts and groups that were involved in ‘inauthentic behavior’. However, King stated that there had still been a lot of disinformation regarding the European elections held in May. He also stated that both sides of the Atlantic were debating the idea of regulating social media networks at the same speed. He referred to a study conducted by George Washington University, which had found that around and during the time of the European elections, 75% of the total comments and 86% of the total shares regarding party political content were pertaining to the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party in Germany.
This was six times the shares and four times the comments made on Facebook of all the other parties combined. The party ended up winning 11% of the overall vote. King asserted that most of the shares and likes stemmed from a cluster of 80,000 accounts that were tweeting the content busily and boasted all the signature features of fake accounts. He mentioned that the most active were 20,000 accounts and they boasted random first and last names, comprised of two letters each, such as EW, CH and MX. If you try to register these names on a birth certificate in Germany, they wouldn’t be considered legal names.
King continued to say that even with their resources and knowledge, if social media networks like Facebook are unable to figure out that that the thousands of coordinated accounts boasting two-letter names are suspicious, then there is a long way for them to go. These accounts constantly engage in activities relating to elections and a lot of focus has been put on them and yet social networks are still unable to root them out. Companies like Mozilla, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter and Google had all agreed to follow EU’s code of practice voluntarily.
Under the rules, they are required to publish reports and King was speaking in regard to them. In an accompanying summary, the Commission stated that some progress had been made, but serious steps still had to be taken. The commission also added that they were also concerned about the fact that different companies were still selling fake accounts for a few hundred euros. Speaking about Facebook, King said that this was a major issue for the social network, which has admitted to hosting about 120 million fake accounts.
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