Good morning! Today, we talk about the struggles to fight misinformation online, Petrobras’s commitment to oil, and the debacles facing the center-right in Brazil.
☕ If you like our work and want to give us an extra boost, you can fill up our reporters’ coffee mugs. Supporters get exclusive perks! Find out more.
Fighting misinformation in the elections: a losing battle?
Facebook published its latest transparency report this week, which included some highly alarming data. The social media giant has taken action against 1.6 billion fake accounts since 2017.
Why it matters. Social media companies have inked deals with electoral authorities to curb the spread of misinformation, but the sheer numbers revealed by Facebook show that these measures are often a poor effort to catch up with spreaders of fake news.
What they are saying. Facebook’s words show that the moves authorities have come up with are almost akin to Sisyphean labor: “We expect the number of accounts we action to vary over time due to the unpredictable nature of adversarial account creation.”
Between the lines. It’s not as if social media companies don’t have ways to create obstacles for setting up fake accounts. But they have no interest in...