European Parliament elections: EU states on guard against fake news on social media

PARIS: Despite the warnings, the campaign for the European Parliament elections has yet to be marked by a flood of fake news, but it is still too early for the EU to declare victory over misinformation.

Ever since the US presidential elections in 2016, which were marked by false information spread on social media aiming to manipulate the electorate, EU member states have been on their guard against fake news.

In an unprecedented move in February, the heads of the German, British and French foreign intelligence services issued a joint statement warning against foreign interference in elections in Europe. The EU polls that will run in member states from May 23-May 26 will be a key test of whether new alert systems put in place since then have had any impact. "This is the key phase now," a European diplomatic source told AFP on condition of anonymity. "We are particularly careful in the days before the elections." But, so far, "there has yet to be a Europe-wide alert."

A rapid alert system, staffed by a dozen people, has been set up in the EU´s External Action Service to closely watch social media and warn of possible risks of interference.

Tech giants and especially Facebook, Google and Twitter have come under immense pressure from EU governments to react better and quicker to take down fake news spread through their sites. News media, including Agence France-Presse (AFP) have also sought to directly combat fake news, by setting up fact-checking services which can explicitly contradict false information. If the EU elections do show an improvement, it is another question whether this is because the situation has improved or just a further sign of apathy for polls where only 42.5 percent of the electorate voted last time around in 2014.

A second European official said even if multiple examples of information manipulations had been reported, none of them was yet of a sufficient scale to justify launching a pan-European alert.

Some examples also were sometimes not directly linked to the elections, but aimed at undermining confidence in institutions or inciting hate against immigrants, the official said. The countries targeted included the Baltic states, Romania, France and Germany with the misinformation originating in Russia and Iran. But none of these, so far, came into a category of being a "clearly coordinated campaign seeking to influence the vote of a certain category of the electorate," said the official.

Facebook has come under particularly heavy attack over the use of its platform in the 2016 American polls and has acknowledged more needs to be done.

It has set up a regional centre in Dublin to prevent the use of adverts sent from abroad that seek to target the electorate.