MANILA - The National Privacy Commission said Tuesday social media users should activate Facebook's tools to secure their accounts while the government investigates the reported surge in dummy pages. It is both Facebook's and the public's responsibility to ensure a safe social media environment, said NPC Commissioner Raymund Liboro. "Ngayon lang tayo nakakita ng ganito, widespread bigla, marami nagreport at sabay sabay. Sisiguraduhin natin na malaman natin kung ano ang puno’t dulo nito," Liboro told Teleradyo. (This is the first time I've seen a sudden, widespread reporting. We will ensure that we will get to the bottom of this) Reports of dummy accounts swirled over the weekend. The cybersecurity units of the police, the Justice Department and the Privacy Commission are working with the platform to investigate the source of the fake accounts. Facebook said Sunday it was investigating unusual activities on its platform. Liboro said the social media network had taken down some dummy accounts, the extent of which could not be immediately determined. news.abs-cbn.com
Twitter has been suspending more than one million fake and dubious accounts per day, according to The Washington Post, in an aggressive bid to stem the flow of false information. The social media platform has more than doubled its crackdown rate since late last year, the Post said, when testimony from Twitter, Facebook and Google revealed startling new data showing many more millions of Americans were exposed to fake news than previously thought. Russia-linked fake accounts are believed to have fired off false tweets in an effort to sway the 2016 US presidential vote. In recent years Twitter, which has some 336 million active users, has faced sharp criticism for allegedly not doing enough to control the proliferation of bots and trolls created to spread disinformation. The new offensive against such accounts represents something of an ideological shift in the tech company; it had long abstained from policing potential abuses of the platform in the name of free speech. Del Harvey, Twitter's vice president for trust and safety, told the Post that the company is changing "how we think about balancing free expression versus the potential for free expression to chill someone else's speech." "Free expression doesn't really mean much if people don't feel safe," Harvey told the paper. Well-known Twitter fan Donald Trump meanwhile questioned whether the San Francisco-based company—which has not said whether the ongoing effort could cause a rare decline in its user base in the second quarter—would also target major legitimate news sources in its drive to root out false information. "Twitter is getting rid of fake accounts at a record pace," the US president tweeted. "Will that include the Failing New York Times and propaganda machine for Amazon, the Washington Post, who constantly quote anonymous sources that, in my opinion, don't exist -- They will both be out of business in 7 years!" source: news.abs-cbn.com
