Fake news: Facebook pages removed in Europe 2019

Investigations into fake news on social media site Facebook in 2019 revealed a large number of pages and groups that were flagged by reporters and researchers as “disinformation”. Some of these pages and groups were subsequently removed or were still under investigation when the statistic was published. The report focused on six different countries in Europe, with varying numbers of suspect pages and groups in each.

Fake news frequency

Encountering fake news is, for the majority of European citizens, a weekly or daily occurrence. According to a 2018 survey across all 28 European member states, 37 percent come across fake news every day, or almost every day.

The language of disinformation

In May 2019, the average number of Facebook interactions was measured for the top five junk and professional news sources in seven different European languages. In four of the seven languages, interactions for professional news stories were completely outweighed by the number of interactions for junk news stories.

Number of Facebook pages and groups removed, following investigations into fake news in Europe in 2019, by country

Characteristic	Flagged	Removed or under investigation
-	-	-
-	-	-
-	-	-
-	-	-
-	-	-
-	-	-

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Release date

May 2019

More information

Region

Europe

Survey time period

2019

Supplementary notes

The source adds the following information: "A team of investigative reporters, researchers and data analysts monitored disinformation operations across the continent, focusing on identifying fake news and hate speech"

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