Facebook building a 'war room' to battle election meddling
Facebook building a 'war room' to battle election
meddling
AFP • September 19, 2018
San Francisco (AFP) - Facebook on Wednesday said it will
have a "war room" up and running on its Silicon Valley campus to
quickly repel efforts to use the social network to meddle in upcoming
elections.
"We are setting up a war room in Menlo Park for the
Brazil and US elections," Facebook elections and civic engagement director
Samidh Chakrabarti said during a conference call.
"It is going to serve as a command center so we can
make real-time decisions as needed."
He declined to say when the "war room" --
currently a conference room with a paper sign taped to the door -- would be in
operation.
Teams at Facebook have been honing responses to potential
scenarios such as floods of bogus news or campaigns to trick people into
falsely thinking they can cast ballots by text message, according to
executives.
"Preventing election interference on Facebook has
been one of the biggest cross-team efforts the company has seen,"
Chakrabarti said.
The conference call was the latest briefing by Facebook
regarding efforts to prevent the kinds of voter manipulation or outright
deception that took place ahead of the 2016 election the brought US President
Donald Trump to office.
Facebook is better prepared to defend against efforts to
manipulate the platform to influence elections and has recently thwarted
foreign influence campaigns targeting several countries, chief executive Mark
Zuckerberg said last week in a post on the social network.
"We've identified and removed fake accounts ahead of
elections in France, Germany, Alabama, Mexico and Brazil," Zuckerberg
said.
- 'Better prepared' for attacks -
"We've found and taken down foreign influence
campaigns from Russia and Iran attempting to interfere in the US, UK, Middle
East, and elsewhere -- as well as groups in Mexico and Brazil that have been
active in their own country."
Zuckerberg repeated his admission that Facebook was
ill-prepared for the vast influence efforts on social media in the 2016 US
election but added that "today, Facebook is better prepared for these
kinds of attacks."
Facebook has started showing who is behind
election-related online ads, and have shut down accounts involved in
coordinated stealth influence campaigns.
With the help of artificial intelligence software,
Facebook blocked nearly 1.3 billion fake accounts between March and October of
last year, according to Chakrabarti.
"We are working hard to amplify the good and
mitigate the bad," news feed director Greg Marra said on the call.
As elections near, Facebook will also encourage civic
involvement and voter registration, according to global politics and government
outreach director Katie Harbath.
Facebook has partnered with non-profit organizations to
bolster election integrity efforts outside the US and has been meeting with
other technology companies to coordinate sharing information about election
meddling efforts spanning social media platforms, according to Harbath.
Facebook said it has also started working with political
campaigns to improve staff online security practices, such as requiring more
than just a password to access an account.
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