BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The European Union’s executive proposed on Wednesday spending more money to counter fake news on the Internet, establishing an early warning system to alert governments and pushing tech companies do more to stop disinformation before next year’s EU elections. Before elections to the European Parliament in May 2019, the Commission wants to see tech giants such as Facebook and Google agree to step up efforts to remove misleading or illegal content. That is far less than the billions of dollars that NATO and the EU say Russia spends on disinformation, but Western governments are wary of any strategy that could be construed as indoctrination. A third step for the EU would be to create a “rapid alert” mechanism to warn governments, so they can fend off developing disinformation campaigns. Facebook has stepped up fact-checking to counter fake news and is working on lowering the ranking of such disinformation to making it less visible.

Source: Egypt Independent December 05, 2018 12:45 UTC