Ahead of the 2019 general elections in Nigeria, social media giant, Facebook has announced opening its first physical elections war room in Menlo Park, California.
TheNewsGuru (TNG) reports Facebook’s goal is to get the right subject-matter experts from across the company in one place so they can address potential problems identified by its technology in real time and respond quickly.
“The war room has over two dozen experts from across the company – including from our threat intelligence, data science, software engineering, research, community operations and legal teams. These employees represent and are supported by the more than 20,000 people working on safety and security across Facebook.
“When everyone is in the same place, the teams can make decisions more quickly, reacting immediately to any threats identified by our systems, which can reduce the spread of potentially harmful content.
“Our dashboards offer real-time monitoring on key elections issues, such as efforts to prevent people from voting, increases in spam, potential foreign interference, or reports of content that violates our policies.
“The team also monitors news coverage and election-related activity across other social networks and traditional media. These efforts give us a collective view and help track what type of content may go viral.
“To prepare, our team has also done extensive scenario-planning to game out potential threats – from harassment to voter suppression – and developed systems and procedures in advance to respond effectively,” Facebook said on Thursday.
The social media giant in a statement by Samidh Chakrabarti, Facebook Director of Product Management, Civic Engagement, said the preparations helped a lot during the first round of Brazil’s presidential elections.
“The work we are doing in the war room builds on almost two years of hard work and significant investments, in both people and technology, to improve security on Facebook, including during elections.
“Our machine learning and artificial intelligence technology is now able to block or disable fake accounts more effectively – the root cause of so many issues.
“We’ve increased transparency and accountability in our advertising. And we continue to make progress in fighting false news and misinformation.
“That said, security remains an arms race and staying ahead of these adversaries will take continued improvement over time. We’re committed to the challenge.” the Facebook Director stated.
Speaking further on efforts to prevent people from misusing Facebook during elections, the social media platform said it has also broadened its policies against voter suppression, action that is designed to deter or prevent people from voting.
“We already prohibit offers to buy or sell votes as well as misrepresentations about the dates, locations, times and qualifications for casting a ballot. We have been removing this type of content since 2016.
“Last month, we extended this policy further and are expressly banning misrepresentations about how to vote, such as claims that you can vote using an online app, and statements about whether a vote will be counted (e.g. “If you voted in the primary, your vote in the general election won’t count.”).
“We’ve also recently introduced a new reporting option on Facebook so that people can let us know if they see voting information that may be incorrect, and have set up dedicated reporting channels for state election authorities so that they can do the same,” said Jessica Leinwand, Facebook Public Policy Manager.
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