As Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg faces hours of questioning from Congress this week over how the social media platform handles its users’ data, the question of internet privacy and the spread of "fake news" has been hard to escape.
We now know the Russian government has been able to use platforms like Facebook to spread misinformation in an attempt to sew chaos in mistrust in our democracy here in the United States.
But across the pond, the European Union has created a specialized task force to identify Russia’s fake-news strategies and expose them to the public. It’s called the East StratCom Task Force and, according to Thomas Holt, it’s exactly what the U.S. government should be doing.
Holt studies the role of the internet in fraud and deception in the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University.
