Facebook has set up a “war room” at its California headquarters as part of its plans to avoid a repeat of the 2016 election, when misinformation was rampant on the platform.
The room is designed to bring leaders from the company’s policy, legal, and security teams together as political campaigning ramps up in the final weeks before November’s midterm elections.
The company has been under intense scrutiny from Congress, federal investigators, and the media, after it emerged that Russian government-linked operatives manipulated its platform to target Americans in 2016.
The company says it has hired thousands of new moderators, invested in artificial intelligence, enlisted the help of former US intelligence officials, and brought in new rules for political advertising — all in an effort to tackle a misinformation crisis.
Samidh Chakrabarti, Facebook’s director of elections and head of civic engagement, told CNN that the war room was “really the culmination of two years of massive investments we’ve made both in people and technology to ensure that our platforms are safe and secure for elections. So it builds upon work that we’ve done to crack down on fake accounts, on combating the spread of fake news on our platforms.”
Chakrabarti said the trolls are getting more sophisticated. Read more