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Article

26 Mar 2019

Author:
Avaaz

Yellow vests flooded by fake news: over 100M views of disinformation on Facebook

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Avaaz calls on Facebook to Correct the Record ahead of EU Elections -- with an in-depth study showing how fake news surrounding the Yellow Vests reached over 100 million views, and how Russia fueled the divide... According to its findings, fake news surrounding the French Yellow Vest movement has reached an estimated 105 million views on Facebook alone, in a country with just over 35 million Facebook monthly active users... Furthermore, the findings shine a light on the increased efforts from Russian state media, RT France, to fuel the protests... A second part of the report focused on YouTube...

Avaaz believes that the fake news surrounding the Yellow Vests has been especially impactful, because the vast majority of millions of French citizens exposed to it have never been informed if they have seen fake news, or seen factual corrections. Because even if content is fact-checked and found to be untrue, Facebook only shows what they call “related articles” to a very small percentage of the users who have actually seen the fake news... [T]he solution to this problem is simple: Platforms must themselves work with factcheckers to “Correct the Record” by distributing independent third party corrections to EVERY SINGLE person who saw the false information in the first place.