The European Commission has pledged to crackdown on social media firms in a fresh drive to silence so called ‘fake news’ propagated by their networks.

Spurred by a recent leak of Facebook data, the commission has vowed to intervene in order to prevent democratic processes from being ‘subverted’ ahead of next year’s elections to the European Parliament.

Sir Julian King, European commissioner for security, is leading calls for a ‘clear game plan’ to tackle the issue, including a ‘more binding approach’ than self-regulation in the fight against the spread of disinformation online.

In a letter to his colleague, Mariya Gabriel, commissioner for the digital economy, King wrote: “It is clear that the cyber-security threat we are facing is changing from one primarily targeting systems to one that is also increasingly about deploying cyber means to manipulate behaviour, deepen societal divides, subvert our democratic systems and raise questions about our democratic institutions.”

Far from a solely European issue, the Indian government vowed to cancel the accreditation of journalists found guilty of writing fake news over the weekend in a bid to clampdown on its spread across the sub continent.