Italy braces for election in the age of fake news

We ask the social networks, and especially Facebook, to help us have a clean electoral campaign, said Matteo Renzi, the leader of the Democratic Party

With critical national elections only months away, anxiety is building that Italy will be the next target of a destabilizing campaign of fake news and propaganda, prompting the leader of the country’s governing party to call on Facebook and other social media companies to police their platforms.
 
“We ask the social networks, and especially Facebook, to help us have a clean electoral campaign,” Matteo Renzi, the leader of the Democratic Party, said in an interview on Thursday. “The quality of the democracy in Italy today depends on a response to these issues.”
 
In a global atmosphere already thick