Despite an aggressive crackdown by social media firms, “junk news” is spreading at a greater rate than in 2016 on social media ahead of Tuesday’s US congressional election, Oxford Internet Institute researchers said in a study.
Twitter said Saturday it deleted a “series of accounts” that attempted to share disinformation. It gave no number.
Facebook last month said it took down accounts linked to an Iranian effort to influence US and British politics with messages about charged topics such as immigration and race relations.
The social network identified 82 pages, groups, and accounts that originated in Iran and violated policy on coordinated “inauthentic” behaviour.
Posts on the accounts or pages, which included some hosted by Facebook-owned Instagram, focused mostly on “sowing discord” via strongly divisive issues rather than on particular candidates or campaigns.
Sample posts shared included inflammatory commentary about US President Donald Trump, British Prime Minister Theresa May and the controversy around freshly appointed US Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Major online social platforms have been under intense pressure to avoid being used by “bad actors” out to sway outcomes by publishing misinformation and enraging voters.
Facebook weeks ago opened a “war room” at its Menlo Park headquarters in California to be a nerve center for the fight against misinformation and manipulation of the largest social network by foreign actors trying to influence elections in the United States and elsewhere.
The shutdown of thousands of Russian-controlled accounts by Twitter and Facebook — plus the indictments of 14 people from Russia’s notorious troll farm the Internet Research Agency — have blunted but by no means halted their efforts to influence US politics.
Facebook, which has been blamed for doing too little to prevent misinformation efforts by Russia and others in the 2016 US election, now wants the world to know it is taking aggressive steps with initiatives like the war room.
The war room is part of stepped-up security announced by Facebook, which will be adding some 20,000 employees
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