Facebook launched a public relations campaign centered on ensuring its users the social media giant has upped its game when it comes to protecting election integrity in the U.S., EU and around the world.
Facebook’s Katie Harbath, global politics and government outreach director, Samidh Chakrabarti, director of product management, civic engagement and Anika Geisel, public policy elections, Europe, In a pair of blogs posted on Jan. 28 Facebook gave a rundown on what it has already done along with some additional election efforts.
This includes expanding Facebook’s political advertising transparency policies by launching new tools to help prevent foreign interference and any advertisers need to be authorized prior to making any purchases.
Specifically for the EU “To run electoral ads or ads about highly debated and important issues related to the European Parliament Elections, advertisers will be required to confirm their identity and include additional information about who is responsible for their ads,” the EU-focused blog said.
Next, Facebook will set up two regional operations centers that will focus on election integrity, one located in Dublin the other in Singapore. These teams will be tasked with defending against fake news, hate speech and voter suppression.
“This will allow our global teams to better work across regions in the run-up to elections, and will further strengthen our coordination and response time between staff in Menlo Park and in-country,” the blog stated.
As part of this effort, Facebook said it is increasing its ability to fight fake news by removing content that violates its community standards, fact-checking some articles, removing clickbait and sensational material and giving readers the ability to look up additional information on the articles published, including the publisher.
