To spread a message that it is more election-ready, the social network earlier on Wednesday leaned on its experience in Germany, which re-elected Angela Merkel to a fourth term as chancellor on Sunday. Facebook said that it had taken roughly a dozen significant steps to combat misinformation on its site before the German elections, including deleting “tens of thousands” of Facebook accounts that it had suspected of being fake. Facebook invited German news outlets into its Berlin offices to film broadcasts on its Facebook Live video service to report on the outcome of the election. That Facebook’s influence did not heavily distort the German elections may also have been the result of other factors. Although some examples of fake news did emerge during the German election, they were quickly identified and debunked.

Source: New York Times September 27, 2017 22:43 UTC