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MENLO PARK, Calif. – Between Building 20 and Building 21, at the heart of Facebook's campus, a conference room of approximately 25 feet by 35 feet is under construction.
Thick strings of blue wires hang from the ceiling, ready to be attached to computer screens the size of a window on 16 desks. On a wall, half a dozen televisions will be broadcast on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and other major networks. A small piece of paper with orange letters glued to the glass door describes what is being built: "War Room".
Although it is not much to look at now, the space will be, next week, the seat of Facebook for the safeguard of the elections. More than 300 people are working on this initiative, but the War Room will be hosting a team of about 20 people who will work to eliminate misinformation, monitor misinformation and remove false accounts that may influence voters before elections in the United States. , Brazil and other countries.
"We consider this to be the biggest company-wide shift from desktop to mobile," said Samidh Chakrabarti, who leads the election and presidential elections team. Facebook's civic engagement. The company, he added, "has mobilized to achieve this".
The misuse of Facebook by foreign influence campaigns has been commonplace. In July and August, the company detailed undisclosed efforts by Iranians and Russians to deceive social network users through ads and divisive messages. Now that the midterm elections will take place in the United States seven weeks ago, Facebook is in a total sprint to convince the world that it is ready to face new attempts at interference. The company is under enormous pressure to prevent a repetition of foreign manipulations that took place on the social network during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, promised to solve the problems and said this month that the company was "better prepared" to handle potential interference. But he acknowledged that Facebook was in an "arms race" against those who tried to manipulate the platform. The company has taken steps to build defenses against spammers, pirates and foreign agents – including hiring thousands of people to moderate content and launching archives to catalog all political ads. the efforts are.
Already, foreign agents have been developing their online influence campaigns to circumvent the measures that Facebook has put in place before the deadlines, said Priscilla Moriuchi, Director of Strategic Threat Development at the Recorded Future cybersecurity firm.
"If you look at how foreign influence operations have changed in the last two years, their purpose is no longer to spread false information," Ms. Moriuchi said. "These are stories of growth that already speak to a hyperpartisan audience."
She added, "For me, it will be harder for companies like Facebook and Twitter to find them now."
Facebook has invited two New York Times reporters into the war room before it opens next week to discuss the work of the election team and some of the tools developed to prevent any interference. The company limited the scope of what The Times could see and publish in an effort to expose too much to adversaries who might be looking for vulnerabilities. The company said the War Room was designed on the model of operations used by political campaigns, which are usually set up in the last weeks before polling day.
The War Room is a "proactive" way to create systems in anticipation of attacks, said Greg Marra, product manager working on Facebook's news feed, during a conference call with reporters on Wednesday. .
One of the tools introduced by the company is custom software that tracks real-time information on the social network, said Chakrabarti, who joined Google about four years ago.
These dashboards look like a set of linear and bar charts, with statistics to see how the activity on the platform is changing. They allow employees to focus, for example, on a specific misinformation widely disseminated or on the creation of automated accounts in a given geographical area.
The dashboards were tested before the special election of the US Senate in Alabama in December. Without specifying the scorecards, Zuckerberg said that a new tool has allowed Facebook to more quickly identify political interference in these elections.
Since then, Facebook has tested and redesigned the software in several elections around the world. This month, before the Brazilian presidential election, the company will present the new versions of the dashboards, said Mr Chakrabarti.
In 2007, Facebook created what it calls the Elections and Civic Engagement Team to work with governments and campaigns on how to use the social network as effectively as possible. For a long time, the team only had a few dozen people in Silicon Valley; in 2013, it expanded to include members in other offices outside the United States.
After Facebook revealed that Kremlin-related agents had manipulated the social network to broadcast inflammatory messages to US voters in the 2016 elections. The company began to increase the ranks of the team. The group has also been restructured to focus more on election security.
Since then, the team has reached its current size, reinforced by other people in the company whose tasks involve a number of electoral interventions. Facebook said that each of its units – including Instagram and WhatsApp – had been ordered to make election security a top priority when designing products.
Chakrabarti meets several times a month with Facebook's executives, engineers and product managers. Meetings often include Mr. Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer.
Facebook decided this year to create a war room so that a group of engineers, data specialists and executives could sit in the same space before mid-session. They chose an empty conference room at the end of the hallway that connects Building 20 and Building 21, a central hub of Facebook's easy-access campus for employees.
The construction began a few months ago and the room, with its white walls and groups of long tables, is expected to open on Monday. It has been remodeled with Internet cables and boosters, and new cabling has been installed for monitors and other equipment.
What's happening in the war room will be a "last line of defense" for Facebook engineers to quickly spot unexpected problems in elections and elections in different countries, Chakrabarti said. Many of the other steps taken by the company are aimed at ending misinformation and other problems long before they appear in the war room.
Once a problem reaches the War Room, the dashboards will be set to detect and track unusual activities, while data specialists and security experts will take a closer look. Chakrabarti said the team was particularly attentive to "real danger" messages and planned to remove messages that were trying to deprive voters of their rights by spreading incorrect poll data or spreading hoaxes. .
"The best thing for us is that nothing happens in the war room," he said. "All we do is the defenses we put in place to stop it."
Follow Sheera Frenkel and Mike Isaac on Twitter: @ Shehef and @MikeIsaac.
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