Facebook creates 'war room' to combat fake news ahead of US midterms
As the 2018 U.S. midterm elections approach, social media giant Facebook has set up what it is calling a “war room” to prevent interference from bad actors.
Inside the war room at its Menlo Park, California headquarters, are more than two dozen experts from divisions across the company, including software engineering, threat, intelligence and data science, as well as its legal teams, working on identifying real-time threats and preventing the spread of harmful content. The company says those experts are supported by more than 20,000 additional employees.
Employees working in and with the war room are hoping to identify what type of content may go viral, while assessing its credibility.
“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 company said in a statement. “The team also monitors news coverage and election-related activity across other social networks and traditional media.”
Facebook also said its teams have prepared by “gaming out” potential threats, ranging from harassment to voter suppression, in order to have prepared response plans in place.
The push to protect its servers come after it was determined that Russian actors carried out an extensive political cyber campaign in an attempt to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Initially, CEO Mark Zuckerberg brushed off those claims as improbable.
In the aftermath of that revelation, social media sites are pushing to better protect users from misinformation.
Facebook maintained that its revamped strategies worked well during the recent presidential elections in Brazil, where the company was able to quickly detect and remove a false post that began to go viral claiming the election had been switched to a new date due to national protests.
However, during testimony before lawmakers on Capitol Hill earlier this year, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg acknowledged the significant challenge of combating evolving threats on their platforms.