In its security development spree, Facebook has deployed technology tools like Artificial intelligence and thousands of people focusing on upcoming government elections. Several countries are under the radar: India, Pakistan, Brazil, Mexico, the US, Macedonia, Germany, and Hungary.
CEO Zuckerberg termed 2018 a ‘big year for elections. The process sees the social media enhancing security features on its platform to prevent trolls from spreading info.
Facebook has about 15,000 people working on security and content review. Zuckerberg stated that the number is to reach 20,000 by the end of the year.
There have been a number of important elections that we’ve focused on. A few months after the 2016 elections, there was a French presidential election and leading up to that we deployed some new AI tools that took down more than 30,000 fake accounts. – Mark Zuckerberg
The IRA issue after the 2016 US elections led the company to take down the agency pages that had been targeting the US. Last year, social media successfully deployed AI tools to remove Macedonian trolls spreading information during the election.
Facebook developed a new playbook for the German elections and will be working with the local election commission regarding sharing info on the threats received.
These are literally the same type of people who had been sending you Viagra emails in the ’90s. We can attack it on both sides. On the revenue side, we make it so that they can’t run the Facebook ad network. – Mark Zuckerberg
As pointed out by Zuckerberg, three major elements required different strategies for taking security measures. These are economic spammers, government interference in elections, and false media.
As for the second, Zuckerberg referred to the likes of the Russian interference in 2016. He mentioned that some media companies that are sanctioned news outlets in Russia are the organizations that are completely owned, controlled and operated by the IRA. He said on this: “So we take them down and treat that as a security issue.”
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Via: The Economic Times
