European Commission wants tech companies to do more against fake news

The European Commission has reprimanded major tech companies for not doing enough to combat fake news. Although major tech companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter have promised to tackle fake news, little has been shown in practice.

This is stated in a report released by the European Commission on Friday and on which the Reuters news agency reports. The European Commission’s criticism focuses not only on content distributed by users on the various platforms, but also on advertisements that are not strictly enough checked for fake news.

According to the European Commission, more measures should be taken to prevent the spread of fake news. In addition, it seems that large companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter are not keeping their promises; too little information can be extracted from the data supplied to the European Commission to get a good picture of the activities of the tech companies.

Since the 2016 US election, the spread of fake news on online platforms has been the focus of much attention. Virtually all major tech companies have promised to pay more attention to this, for example by removing fake news distributed by governments, but also to moderate certain politically charged advertisements more strictly.