Brussels plans crackdown on ‘fake news’ in social media

Brussels is preparing to crack down on social media companies who have been accused of spreading “fake news”, issuing a stark warning that scandals such as the Facebook data leak threaten to “subvert our democratic systems”. The European Commission fears that next year’s elections to the European Parliament are vulnerable to mass eurosceptic online “disinformation”. Its concern sharpened after a whistleblower alleged that Cambridge Analytica gathered personal information from up to 50m Facebook users and used it to target voters in the US presidential election. Cambridge Analytica has denied using Facebook data in its modelling.