IT IS less than a month until the US presidential election, and Facebook’s misinformation problem is as rampant as ever. Despite pledges from the social media firm to tackle hate speech and false content on its platform in the wake of interference during the 2016 US elections, progress has been glacial.

In a fraught year marked by the coronavirus pandemic, widespread protests over racial inequality and severe wildfires in the US, the consequences of fake news are more serious than ever. According to one estimate, health misinformation on Facebook has been viewed 3.8 billion times in the past …