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Hi, I'm Queenie Wong from CNET, and we just came from Facebook's election war room.
Ever since the 2016 presidential election the company has really In trying to prove to the public that it can stop election meddling.
And so we walked into the space.
It's a very intimate room full of about 20 people from different teams, operations, data scientists, researchers that are really working together and working with Facebook's team of 20,000 people.
To stop election meddling, right before the midterm elections.
On the walls, we're monitoring both internal and external signals.
So internally, we're looking for any spikes in user-supported content that might be election-related.
Such as voter suppression or hate speech.
Externally, we're looking at media sources to just get an understanding of what's happening on the ground as well as monitoring any election related content on other social media platforms.
We had to deal with spam, click bait, fake news and data misuse.
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That's going to change.
We have been hard at work for the last two years To make sure that we're far more prepared than we were then in 2016.
And so that includes cracking down on fake accounts.
So, as an example there, we have actually made huge advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning and we have been able to block in recent 6 month period 1.3 billion fake accounts from forming.
Another examples in our work to combat fake news We've really been going after the financial incentives for people to produce fake news in the first place.
We've reduced click bait.
We've reduced the ability for people who run ad farms to be successful on our platform.
On the whiteboard, we kind of have
The flow of how the war room show work, so any inputs or signals we're receiving come in.
We make sure that they're thoroughly investigated by threat intel or data science and then passed off to the right operations team that know our community standards policy and can decide whether or not something should be taken down.
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I think one of the strengths of having everybody in the same place together is just the speed with which we're able to act between detecting a problem in the first place and eventually taking action.
And typically we found, through our experience with the first round of the Brazilian presidential election just a week ago, being able to go from detection to action in just a couple of hours.
Ever since the 2016 presidential election, Facebook has obviously been trying to prove to the public that they are better prepared for the upcoming elections than they have been in past.
But we'll have to kind of see whether or not this is enough.
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