The first round of French elections will be held on April 23rd, prompting Facebook to shut down pro Le Pen accounts, which they deem to be 'fake.' In an effort to fight 'fake news' or misinformation, Facebook has targeted 30,000 'fake accounts' in order to control the information that its users consume. In a statement to AFP, the company said they were trying to "reduce the spread of material generated through inauthentic activity, including spam, misinformation, or other deceptive content that is often shared by creators of fake accounts." They are targeting accounts with the highest amount of traffic -- since they pose a grave threat to the croissant eating frog lovers in France. In addition to outright bans, the company, in conjunction with French media, are running 'fact checking' programs -- designed to fight 'fake news', heightening their efforts around the elections -- which spans from 4/23-5/7. All of this hysteria happened after Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump's twitter account this past November -- prompting officials to pressure Facebook and Twitter to do something about the brazen belittling and subversion of the main stream media. Last week, the company launched a tool to help its users identify 'fake news' in 14 countries -- including the U.S., France and Germany. About a month ago, Facebook disabled our Facebook account, after we posted a picture of Chuck Schumer with Vlad Putin. This was a widely circulated news story at the time, which involved zero deception or any of the hallmarks that could be construed as being 'fake news.' Nevertheless, we lost access to the account and have ceased using the platform since then. For those who publish independently and rely upon the 'socials' for traffic, heed the warnings given by Matt Drudge, founder of the Drudge Report, who compared them to ghettos -- corporate controlled denizens of propaganda. Content originally published at iBankCoin.com