Big Tech Firms Not Doing Enough to Fight Fake News, Activist NGO Says

Twitter, Google’s YouTube, Meta Platform’s Facebook, Microsoft’s LinkedIn and TikTok are not doing enough to remove fake news from their platforms, raising doubts about their ability to comply with new EU online content rules, activist NGO Avaaz said on Tuesday.

The companies are due to present reports this week on the measures they have taken to comply with the updated EU code of practice on disinformation which is linked to the online content rules known as the Digital Services Act (DSA) that came into force last November.

Avaaz said it analysed a sample pool of 108 fact-checked pieces of content related to a 2022 American anti-vaccine film and found efforts by the social media platforms including Meta’s Instagram to remove disinformation fell short.

“Overall, just 22 percent of disinformation content we analysed was either labelled or removed by the six major platforms,” Avaaz said.

It said the companies did not do enough to tackle disinformation in languages other than English.

“Despite explicit platform commitments in the code to improve their services in all EU languages, our research found that in certain EU languages – Italian, German, Hungarian, Danish, Spanish and Estonian – no platform took any action against violating posts,” Avaaz said.

“This study suggests that most of the major platforms are failing to comply with their Code of Practice commitments and might infringe upcoming DSA obligations,” the group said.

Meta, Alphabet, Twitter, and Microsoft last year vowed to take a tougher line against disinformation after committing to the updated EU code.

Companies face fines up to 6 percent of their global turnover for DSA violations.

© Thomson Reuters 2023


Affiliate links may be automatically generated – see our ethics statement for details.

For all the latest Technology News Click Here 

 For the latest news and updates, follow us on Google News

Read original article here

Denial of responsibility! TechNewsBoy.com is an automatic aggregator around the global media. All the content are available free on Internet. We have just arranged it in one platform for educational purpose only. In each content, the hyperlink to the primary source is specified. All trademarks belong to their rightful owners, all materials to their authors. If you are the owner of the content and do not want us to publish your materials on our website, please contact us by email – [email protected]. The content will be deleted within 24 hours.