KATHMANDU: The Election Commission (EC) has pledged to curb fake news and misinformation circulating through the social networking sites targeting the upcoming House of Representatives (HoR) elections.

Organizing a news conference on Friday, the EC officials said the EC was closely monitoring the possibilities of wrong news, fake news and negative activities that could be circulated in the social sites targeting the March 5 HoR polls.

EC Spokesperson Narayan Prasad Bhattarai said that monitoring of fake news, hate speech, deep fake, fake account, defamation and related aspects would be carried out and the illegal activities would be punished as per the laws adding that collaboration would be forged with the regulatory bodies for this.

The EC also shared that officials of Meta and TikTok were consulted this week regarding the ways to curb fake news, hate speech, deep fake, fake account and defamation among others.

For this, Meta, TikTok and X (formerly known as Twitter) have been written for the part of coordination.

EC Spokesperson Bhattarai said that Information and Integrity Promotion Unit under the Information Dissemination and Coordination Centre has begun its work for the monitoring of the social sites through software.