Facebook blocking bogus accounts, monitoring abuse to combat fake news

Social media giant Facebook has said that it has initiated a series of measures, including blocking fake accounts to combat fake news, proactively monitor abuse and increase advertisement transparency as part of its efforts to prevent outsiders' interference in any general elections across the world.

Facebook has been facing criticism for helping to spur violence and for its policies surrounding misinformation in general.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder and CEO, had to face grilling in the US and in the European parliament over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which Facebook was accused of unduly influencing the 2016 US electoral process.

The social media giant has done some work in the first half of this year to combat fake news all around the world like in Italy, Colombia, Turkey, and even the primaries for US midterms. By the end of the year it will have focused on more than 50 national elections all around the world, Samidh Chakrabarti, Facebook's head of the civic engagement, said.

Cut Facebook out: Have you considered making money selling your own data?

Alice Liogier wants to slap a price on her data.

The 23-year-old graduate student from Paris is researching the commercial use of personal information in the age of big data and she's reached a controversial conclusion: If people really do own their data, then they should be allowed to sell it.

Regulators from Brussels to Beijing are trying to curb the use of personal information and many Facebook users have been reviewing their privacy settings in recent weeks in response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. But Liogier argues that entrepreneurs, officials and executives who want to get to grips with the next phase of the big data era need to look further.

It's not about privacy, she says, it's about ownership and control.

"The debate right now is focused on data protection and privacy -- that's where fears have crystallised," Liogier says. "But selling data and data ownership is the next big topic, and probably the most important topic."