Facebook withholding data on its anti-disinformation efforts, EU says

Facebook has repeatedly withheld key data on its alleged efforts to clamp down on disinformation ahead of the European elections, the EU’s executive has said.

Mark Zuckerberg’s company has been under fire from the European commission for failing to provide it with the “hard numbers” to prove that it was living up to promises made in a voluntary code of conduct.

The commission has also complained that the world’s largest social network had, despite its pledges, only set up “fact checkers” – with the job of scrutinising information shared on the site – in eight of the EU’s 28 member states.

The company’s vice-president of global affairs and communications, the former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, had claimed in January that Facebook had made mistakes in the past but was now entering a “new phase of reform, responsibility and change”.

In a sign of frustration at the lack of hard evidence to back up that claim, a number of failures by Zuckerberg’s firm will be laid out on Thursday in the second monthly EU update on progress made by social media signatories – Facebook, Google and Twitter – to a new code of conduct.

Under the EU code, the web firms are encouraged to disrupt revenue for accounts and sites misrepresenting information, clamp down on fake accounts and bots, and give prominence to more reliable sources of news while improving the transparency of funding of political advertising.

EU sources said the sector was not raising its game but that Facebook was by far the worst offender of those being assessed, offering only “patchy” information on its efforts. “It is very difficult for us to see if they are doing what they should be doing,” said a source.

The EU’s security commissioner, Sir Julian King, and digital economy commissioner, Mariya Gabriel, writing in the Guardian ahead of publication of the progress report, warn that the companies have only “fallen further behind” since last month’s first report.

They said: “The results last time fell short of expectations – so we called on the platforms to go further and faster in their efforts to tackle disinformation. Sadly, despite some progress, rather than improve, they have fallen further behind. The lack of hard numbers is particularly worrying.

“Facebook has again failed…

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