Report September 2026
Submitted
This is the eighth report we share under the 2022 Code of Conduct on Disinformation, which also draws from our work with the Code’s Taskforce. In accordance with the subscription form submitted by Meta Platforms Ireland Limited (Meta) in January 2025, this report is being submitted by Meta in respect of the Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram services, and on behalf of WhatsApp Ireland Limited in respect of the WhatsApp messaging service.
The aim of this report is to provide an update on how Meta approached misinformation and disinformation in the European Union (the EU) and, where relevant, Norway, Liechtenstein, and Iceland (together the EEA) between 01 January 2026 and 30 June 2026. We have additionally included any pertinent updates which occurred after the reporting period, where relevant in the report. Highlights include:
- Elections: Meta's Approach to Elections section provides an overview of our work on elections within the EEA, detailing our core policies, processes, and implementation strategies. It outlines our comprehensive approach to those elections, which continued for elections held in the first half of 2026. The election responses covered in this report include Portugal, Slovenia, Denmark, Hungary, Bulgaria, Cyprus, and Malta elections.
- Expanding generative AI Transparency for Meta’s ads products: In addition to labelling images and videos that were created or significantly edited with our generative AI creative features in our advertiser marketing tools, we announced that we began automatically detecting ads created or edited using third-party AI tools through industry-standard signals. When detected, we’ll apply an “AI info” label. We will continue to evolve our approach to labelling AI-generated content in partnership with experts, advertisers, policy stakeholders, and industry partners as people’s expectations and the technology change.
- Media literacy: Meta published its second Media Literacy Annual Plan on 21 July 2026. The plan sets out Meta’s multifaceted strategy for media literacy in the EU, outlining how products, features, and initiatives help users on Facebook and Instagram critically assess the credibility and context of online content. It also provides details on specific media literacy initiatives run by Meta, including its work on digital citizenship, its media literacy lessons in Get Digital, We Think Digital and Soy Digital, and its election literacy programmes.
- Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviour trends: In the first half of 2026, we disrupted multiple covert influence operations, several of which targeted one or more EEA countries (including Germany, France, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Latvia). We observed the actors behind Russia's most persistent influence operation - Doppelganger - diversify from a single high-volume campaign into a broader portfolio of tactically distinct offshoot efforts, run by the Social Design Agency (SDA) and the state-linked Autonomous Non-Profit organisation (ANO) "Dialog". While the core "brute force" campaign continued to target Germany and France, we now saw offshoot efforts targeting Hungary, Armenia, Moldova, and the United States. As in previous periods, our automated defences detected and blocked much of this activity, including the network's ads. Throughout, we have continued to refine our automated detection based on the behaviours we observe and to engineer campaign-specific defences designed to help block these operators from returning to our platforms.
Here are a few of the figures which can be found throughout the report:
- In Q1 2026, we took action against 1.2 billion fake accounts and in Q2 2026, we took action against 822 million fake accounts on Facebook globally. We estimate that fake accounts represented less than 5% of our worldwide daily active people (DAP) across our family of apps during Q1 2026 and Q2 2026.
- From 01 January 2026 to 30 June 2026, we removed 5,455,002 ads from Facebook and Instagram, of which 67,225 ads were removed from Facebook and Instagram for violating our misinformation or inauthentic behaviour policies.
This report addresses the practices implemented for Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp within the EEA during the reporting period from 01 January 2026 to 30 June 2026. In alignment with Meta’s public announcements on 7 January 2025, we continue to evaluate the applicability of these practices to Meta products. We also regularly review the appropriateness of making adjustments in response to changes in our practices, such as the deployment of Community Notes (which, for the avoidance of doubt, has not been rolled out in the EEA during the reporting period).