Facebook is taking measures to reduce foreign interference and false information going forward. The announcement was part of talks discussing the 2020 US election.
New measures will include securing accounts of elected officials, indicating who owns political pages and introduced fact-checking labels.
“We have a responsibility to stop abuse and election interference on our platform,” said a letter to Facebook Investors, based on a blog post by Facebook Vice President of Integrity Guy Rosen.
The new measures which have been signed off by Mark Zuckerberg are an attempt to stop a repeat of the 2016 US elections.
And the new measures couldn’t have arrived sooner.
According to online activist network and NGO Avaaz, there are hundreds of thousands of political disinformation campaigns currently hounding users.
According to Avaaz, the top 100 fake news stories on Facebook were viewed by more than 158-million views.
The NGO has also called on the likes of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Twitter, Instagram and WhatsApp to be more transparent about “what lies below the surface of this tidal wave approaching the horizon of the US 2020 elections.”
Facebook is set to roll out its new false information initiatives from November 2019.
