Facebook tackles 30,000 fake accounts in France as election looms

The US social media giant took to Facebook on Thursday to announce a range of new security improvements, created to target "deceptive material, such as false news, hoaxes, and misinformation".

Facebook singled out France as a country where it had been implementing the new measures. 

"In France, for example, these improvements have enabled us to take action against over 30,000 fake accounts," Shabnam Shaik, a Facebook security team manager, wrote in an official blog post. 

"While these most recent improvements will not result in the removal of every fake account, we are dedicated to continually improving our effectiveness."

It explained that this had been possible by automatic detection of pages that were repeatedly posting the same content or sending continuous spam messages. 

"We've found that a lot of false news is financially motivated, and as part of our work to promote an informed society, we have focused on making it very difficult for dishonest people to exploit our platform or profit financially from false news sites using Facebook."

With the presidential election taking place in just nine days, many have seen it as a priority to prevent the very modern plague of fake.