Facebook Launches Initiatives to Counter Disinformation in Upcoming French Elections

Euro­pean media is report­ing that Face­book’s par­ent com­pa­ny Meta announced a series of ini­tia­tives on its plat­forms to fight dis­in­for­ma­tion ahead of the French pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. Accord­ing to a Politi­co report:

Feb­ru­ary 16, 2022 PARIS — Face­book’s par­ent com­pa­ny Meta Wednes­day announced a series of ini­tia­tives on its plat­forms to fight dis­in­for­ma­tion ahead of the French pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, includ­ing a new way to flag fake news on its mes­sag­ing ser­vice What­sApp.  What­sApp users will now be able to noti­fy Face­book’s media part­ner Agence France-Presse (AFP) about false infor­ma­tion, and the news agency will be able to reply with fact-check­ing.  The oth­er ini­tia­tives include an aware­ness cam­paign about dis­in­for­ma­tion deployed on Insta­gram with media out­let Loop­sider; anoth­er cam­paign with AFP on Face­book about what to do when fac­ing fake news; and a media lit­er­a­cy pro­gram — the Poyn­ter Insti­tute’s Medi­a­Wise — for What­sApp users in part­ner­ship with France 24 to help peo­ple learn to spot con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, scams, hoax­es and false infor­ma­tion.  “We also rely on tech­no­log­i­cal tools to keep harm­ful con­tent off our plat­forms in real time, and work with four inde­pen­dent fact check­ers in France — AFP, Les Décodeurs du Monde, 20 Min­utes and France 24 — to reduce the cir­cu­la­tion of false infor­ma­tion,” Meta France’s head of pub­lic affairs Anton Bat­testi wrote in a sep­a­rate blog post.

Read the rest here.

In Novem­ber, we report­ed that France had  estab­lished an office to counter for­eign media manip­u­la­tion ahead of the 2022 pres­i­den­tial election.