Labor has urged Parliament’s joint standing committee on electoral matters to investigate social media giant Facebook for refusing to take down fake news about a death tax that circulated during the May election.
The ALP has called for an examination of whether Australian elections are vulnerable to influence by “malinformation”, a term invoked during the recent Federal election.
Labor repeatedly asked Facebook to deal with the false claims shared on the platform which escalated its complaints in the final week before the election.
But Facebook refused to act on the requests, saying that its independent fact-checking procedures had determined the death-tax material was false and demoted the original posts, but was not removed from the platform.
Facebook has been criticised by ACCC chairman Rod Sims, who has said that the company should have removed the bogus death tax claims, given they were found to be false.
