Today at 12:01
Now, Facebook is gearing up for the upcoming American midterm elections and the general election in Brazil with a “war room.”
The room is inside its Silicon Valley headquarters. It was set up to remove fake accounts and bogus news stories, and to prevent malicious attempts to sway national elections.
“We have actually made huge advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, and we’ve been able to block, in the recent six month period, 1.3 billion fake accounts from forming, and this has been really important, because since we’ve been able to block fake accounts normally even at the moment that they were created in the first place. We’ve been able to stop them before they’ve been able to do any harm,” said Samidh Chakrabarti, Facebook’s director of product management.
About 24 people specializing in threat intel operations, data and research are working on rotating teams in the room.
As a part of the crackdown, Facebook also has hired fact checkers, including The Associated Press, to vet new stories posted on its social network.
