Popular social media platform, Twitter, has suspended 61 accounts peddling fake news ahead of the April 9 elections in Israel.
This brings the total of related accounts suspensions to 343 since the election was announced last year. All 61 accounts involved had a total of 28,041 followers and mostly tweeted their fake news in English. With this move, Twitter appears to be making good on its promise to help fight against fake news in upcoming elections around the world.
The Times of Israel reports that “a knowledgeable source told the Times of Israel earlier this month that Twitter had good relations with Israeli government officials, law enforcement and NGOs, and that while it could not be an “arbiter of truth,” it was monitoring online traffic for fake accounts and malicious bots and would be “doing more work” as Israel’s elections approached.
Worldwide, Twitter takes down an astonishing ten million problematic accounts each week and challenges more than half a million suspicious logins every day, the source said.”
Similarly, Facebook announced that it will soon be launching additional tools to help countries, including Israel, combat fake news and its peddlers on the platform. The social media giant stated it will put “additional tools to help prevent foreign interference and make political and issue advertising on Facebook more transparent,” in the quest to help weed minimise the spread of fake news.
Under these new rules, advertisers will need to be authorised before they will be allowed to purchase political adverts on Facebook. The company plans to release the aforementioned tools in the last few weeks of March in Israel and in June for the rest of the world.
Haaretz reports that on Sunday, “the Speaker of Israel’s Knesset, Yuli Edelstein, rejected a request by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Mediterranean, to which Israel belongs, to monitor the national election, the Times of Israel reported. The interparliamentary group, made up of 26 European, North African and Middle Eastern parliaments, noted that foreign and local groups had threatened to attempt to influence the elections, mostly online, according to the report.
Edelstein called the request “an unparalleled expression of arrogance.”
