Facebook Has Built A ‘War Room’ To Prevent Election Meddling

Facebook has had to take a lot of pain over the use of its social network for political misinformation campaigns during the presidential elections. The company has taken concrete steps since then to prevent something like that from happening again. With the U.S. midterm elections approaching, Facebook has set up a physical “war room” at its headquarters to prevent election meddling.

Facebook’s head of civic engagement Samidh Chakrabarti told NBC News that the world’s largest social network is more than ready to take on the challenge after not doing enough to prevent the meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

The physical war room is essentially a computer lab which will be staffed by some of the best brains from across the business. Their objective is to seek out political influence campaigns being run on the platform and stop them in their tracks before they can taint the election process.

The war room will have several screens where important Facebook metrics will be monitored for any unusual activity. Some will even have alarms to notify the staff about unexpected dips or spikes in activity. The staffers will include Facebook employees from its data science, engineering, public policy, and other teams.

“The war room isn’t so much about the technology that’s there as it is about the process of having people across different functions… be able to diagnose and fix any sort of acute issues that we see,” Chakrabarti said.

He added that Facebook is vigilant and focused to ensure that it can stay ahead of these problems while also acknowledging that this is going to be a “never-ending process.”

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Web
Tags: Facebook