In the European Union’s first monthly progress report on how some of the world’s leading tech companies are fighting disinformation, you could say the overall score was about a B-.

EU commissioner Julian King said Facebook Inc., Google LLC, Twitter Inc. and the Mozilla Foundation all need to step up their efforts to combat fake news before the European elections in May. “We don’t want to wake up the day after the elections and realize we should have done more,” King said in a press release.

Facebook seemed to incur the most criticism in not trying hard enough, despite the social media giant’s recent efforts to take down disinformation allegedly created by bad actors from foreign governments. “While we recognize and welcome the progress that’s been made, reporting is still a bit patchy, opaque and self-selecting,” King told the European Commission regarding Facebook’s progress.

In October last year, following months of censure of big tech for not doing enough to stop the spread fake news, the aforementioned companies all signed voluntary code of practice agreement to combat disinformation.

“Leading European researchers have reported back that they’ve not been able to access, for example, Facebook data, and we need to do something about that,” said King. He added that Facebook is heading in the right direction, but like some other platforms, it need to do more.

We welcome the progress made by the signatories of our code of practice against disinformation.
We call on platforms to intensify their efforts in the run up to the #EUelections2019 → https://t.co/tO0BYz95fF #EUvsDisinfo

Commissioner @JKingEU: pic.twitter.com/H2fo9PV9Qg

— European Commission 🇪🇺 (@EU_Commission) January 29, 2019

For its part, Google was said to have implemented all of its commitments regarding “scrutiny of ad placements, transparency of political advertisement and providing users with information, tools and support to empower them in their online experience.”

Twitter, the report said, targeted malicious actors on the platform, while fake and suspicious accounts as well as bots have been shut down. Still, more information is required to prove “persistent purveyors of disinformation” can be thwarted in the future.

The EU has asked Mozilla to show how it will limit the information exposed relating to user browsing data, something that could be used to create disinformation campaigns.

The outlook from the EU seemed positive, with King reminding the companies, “Some commentators have made the point that you can’t fight fire with water pistols, well, it’s time for the platforms to show that they are bringing more than water pistols to this issue.”

Image: Rock Cohen/Flickr