Inside the "war room" Facebook elections at its headquarters

Facebook can not afford to repeat the mistakes of 2016.

In the US presidential election of 2016, the social network was violently used by Russian propagandists, who spread false information and misinformation on a large scale, triggering a chain reaction of scandals for Facebook that echoed nowadays.

Two years later, the United States is preparing for controversial mid-term elections and Facebook is keen to advance its fight against electoral interference.

On Wednesday, the Silicon Valley company invited journalists from its headquarters in Menlo Park, California, to visit the "War Room" set up to tackle the problems associated with the mid-term elections. American session and the campaign for the presidential election still underway in Brazil.

What is Facebook's "war room"?

The "war room" is literally this – a room of experts and team members gathered in a place where they can coordinate more effectively – and Facebook can designate it as a symbol of its efforts to be much more prepared this time. And while society has made significant progress in some areas, there are still worrying indicators that things may not be all right.

The War Room is a group of sitting and standing offices that can accommodate from 20 to 30 people at a time, representing 20 different business teams, from intelligence to threats to moderation. The walls are draped with American and Brazilian flags, as well as clocks indicating different time zones and televisions broadcasting cabled information.

Meanwhile, large computer screens display everything from internal analytics relevant to video conferences with other desktops, to recent tweets in the TweetDeck app.

Samidh Chakrabarti, head of Facebook's civic engagement, said, "When you send a message to someone, do you know if you're paying attention?"

And the dozens of people in the room are also working with their own teams on Facebook, making the War Room a "nerve center for this much larger effort," said Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook's Cybersecurity Policy Officer. .

How is Facebook planning to protect the elections?

Facebook's efforts to protect the elections rest on three main pillars, the company's executives said. He attacks false accounts. This makes advertising more transparent. And he tries to tackle the distribution of false information and misinformation.

Progress has been made in this area, including the creation of an archive of political advertisements accessible to all.

But while Facebook has tried to repress false information on its main Facebook application, this remains a problem for other applications it has, including the WhatsApp messaging application. A recent study found that the majority of the most popular political content shared on the encrypted e-mail application in Brazil is false or misleading.

When they were pressed by the reporters, Facebook executives did not find a satisfactory answer as to how they were trying to combat the flow of false information and false information. Instead, they mentioned minor cosmetic changes, such as adding a "Transferred" indicator next to the sent messages. transferred, to indicate when a message does not come from the sender.

The report's authors provided misleading information about the application, suggesting possible modifications to WhatsApp, including limiting transfers and the size of the new groups, they wrote in a New York Times column – but the company apparently they said "enough time to implement the changes".

The risk of disseminating false information via WhatsApp is less acute in mid-term elections in America, where relatively few people use the application as the primary communication service. But in elections in Europe and elsewhere in the world, the danger is deep. And it's still not clear that Facebook has a handle on it.

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