Social Media giant Facebook, in a recently published blog, listed out the efforts it is making to protect the integrity of upcoming elections in several countries.
In the blog, Facebook said that its tactics include blocking and removing fake accounts, finding and removing bad actors, limiting the spread of false news and misinformation and bringing transparency to political advertising.
The company said that more than 30,000 people are working on safety and security across the company, three times as many as 2017 to support this work. It has also improved its machine learning capabilities, allowing the company to better find and remove violating behaviour.
Some of the additional ways Facebook is working to strengthen its platform ahead of elections in 2019:
Expanding Political Advertising Transparency Policies
Citing Nigera, where Facebook banned foreign sponsored political ads, it said that this will also be implemented during the upcoming Ukraine elections.
Ahead of the European Parliament elections in March, Facebook said it will launch additional tools to help prevent foreign interference and make political and issue advertising on Facebook more transparent. Facebook says that advertisers will need to be authorized to purchase political ads, since the information will be publicly available online in a library for up to seven years.
The library will include information on the range of the ads’ budget, number of people they reached and demographics of who saw the ad, including age, gender and location.
These transparency tools for electoral ads will launch in India in February.
More Resources for Rapid Response for Elections in Europe and Asia
Facebook is planning to set up two new regional operations centers, focused on election integrity, located in its Dublin and Singapore offices. This will allow its global teams to work better work across regions in the run-up to elections.
“These teams will add a layer of defense against fake news, hate speech and voter suppression, and will work cross-functionally with our threat intelligence, data science, engineering, research, community operations, legal and other teams.”Facebook said in its blog
Growing Capacity to Address Misinformation and False News
Saying that its work towards fighting fake news is improving, Facebook follows a three-part framework to improve the quality and authenticity of stories:
- It removes content that violates Facebook Community Standards.
- For content that does not directly violate Facebook’s Community Standards, but still undermines authenticity like clickbait or sensational material, Facebook reduces its distribution in News Feed, so less people see it.
- It informs people by giving them more context on the information they see in News Feed.
The social media giant also said that it is continuing to expand its third-party fact checking program.
“When a fact-checker rates a post as false, we show it lower in News Feed to significantly reduce the number of people who see it. Pages and domains that repeatedly share false news are penalized with reduced distribution and they are not able to monetize or advertise on Facebook, curbing financially-motivated false news.”Facebook blog
While Facebook said that there are improvements, it also admitted that the efforts to improve security never finish.
“We are up against determined adversaries who try to attack on many fronts and we recognize our role and responsibility. We will never stop all the bad actors, but we’re making real progress and we are committed to continuing to improve,” it said.
(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)