Facebook and Google pressured EU experts to soften fake news regulations

Divina Frau-Meigs, who teaches media sociology at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris and was also a member of the expert group, stresses the integrity of the academics in the group, who she believes were working honestly and diligently. However, she still found the financial relationship between the platforms and some other group members troublesome: “It’s a very subtle dependency relationship: it is difficult to focus on the platform that supports you, even without strings attached. The fact that platforms support both academics and journalists is in itself not a problem for Frau-Meigs as long as it is transparent, but the lack of clear criteria and a separate funding entity is.

Source: www.opendemocracy.net