New Delhi: Social media giant Meta said on Thursday that it has a ‘comprehensive’ strategy in place to keep people ‘safe’ and encourage civic engagement for the state elections in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Goa and Manipur starting February 10.
Meta said it will be activating its Elections Operations Center so that it can watch out for potential abuses that could emerge across the platform related to these elections. “That way we can respond to them in real time. We’ve made significant investments in teams and technologies to keep hate speech, misinformation and other forms of harmful content off of the platform,” the company said in a blog post on February 10.
Meta said in addition to ramping up its regional language support, it is giving funding support to its fact-checking partners to deliver training programs for the public and journalists on tools and techniques to verify election information and stories.
Since 2018, Meta has used its Elections Operations Center model for major elections around the world. Meta said it brings together subject matter experts from across the company including from its threat intelligence, data science, engineering, research, operations, policy and legal teams to give it more visibility of emerging threats.
In terms of hate speech the company said it is ‘very aware’ of how hate speech on its platforms can lead to offline harm. “We are also updating our policies regularly to include additional risk areas. To complement that effort, we may deploy technology to identify new words and phrases associated with hate speech, and either remove posts with that language or reduce their distribution. We also take down accounts of repeat offenders or temporarily reduce the distribution of content from such accounts that have repeatedly violated our policies,” it stated.
It said last December, it announced the expansion of ads enforcement, requiring “Paid By For” disclaimers for ads about elections or politics, to include social issues. The enforcement will be applicable on ads that discuss, debate, or advocate for or against important topics.
Meta is launching the security megaphone before elections to remind users to protect their accounts against online threats by activating 2-factor authentication. This will be available in 3 Indian languages including Hindi.
“We will also be offering election day reminders to give voters accurate information and encourage them to share this information with friends on Facebook,” the company said and added that the voluntary code of 2019, under which it received content related escalations from the Election Commision of India for Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp is applicable for these elections as well.
For WhatsApp, it said the limits it imposed on ‘forwards’ have reduced the spread of ‘highly forwarded’ messages on the messaging platform by over 70%. “Our advanced spam detection technology works round the clock to spot and take action on accounts engaging in automated and bulk messaging, which results in us banning such accounts for violating WhatsApp’s Terms of Service. We banned over 2 million accounts in the month of December 2021 alone,” Meta said.
It said ahead of all elections, it trains political parties about the responsible use of WhatsApp and party workers are cautioned about the possibility of their accounts getting banned if they send WhatsApp messages to people without prior user consent.
“We won’t hesitate to take additional steps if necessary to protect this important exercise of democracy in India and keep our platform and the Indian people safe before, during, and after the voting ends,” the company said.
