Facebook gets into action to clip abuse. In order to avoid abuse and fake news during Pakistan’s elections2018, Facebook has geared up its efforts and platform is doing everything to prevent inappropriate events before elections.
Facebook is directly working with the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) to better understand andaddress the specific challenges faced locally in Pakistan associated with all Facebook’s platforms like WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook itself.
A statement by Facebook reads,
“We have been working proactively with the Election Commission of Pakistan to help support their effort to maintain the integrity of the election. Facebook has helped educate Election Commission officials on how our platform works with the goal of increasing transparency, improving security, and promoting civic engagement”.
Moreover, to cooperate with parties and their candidates in Pakistan,Facebook has launched a website named “Pakistan Election Integrity Initiative”.
The objective of making this website is to “offer tips and best practices in English and Urdu for politicians and political parties”. In this way, political parties can engage their followers through their Facebook Pages and accounts. This move by Facebook will also secure candidate and party Pages from hacking.
It is important to mention here that Facebook is also increasing the number of people to 20 thousand by the end of 2018 to handle security issues worldwide. The company is employing these teams to combat fake news in elections across the globe including Pakistan.
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In order to recognize false news, Facebook will use the combination of AI and human review. It has partnered with AFP for Third Party Fact Checking;that will help it even more to monitor content on its platform easily.
To mark “potentially false stories” Facebook will “use signals as well as feedback from people on Facebook and click bait sensationalist head linesso that fact-checkers such as AFP could review them.
In addition, ahead of Election Day, Facebook will set a reminder for Pakistani community with a vote reminder, which will appear as a megaphone at the top of users’ News Feed.
Facebook states;
“When fact-checkers rate a story as false, we significantly reduce its distribution in News Feed — dropping future views on average by more than 80%. Pages and domains that repeatedly share false news will also see their distribution reduced and their ability to monetize and advertise removed.”
Furthermore, Facebook shared and highlighted several important guide linesin its statement, which you can read below.
“We also want to empower people to decide for themselves what to read, trust, and share. When third-party fact-checkers write articles about the accuracy of a news story, we show these articles in Related Articles immediately below the story in News Feed. We also send people and Page Admins notifications if they try to share a story or have shared one in the past that’s been determined to be false.
This week, we will be posting a Public Service Announcement at the top of News Feed – visible to our entire Facebook community in Pakistan – with a link to these false news tips.
We’re taking significant steps to bring more transparency to ads and Pages on Facebook. Anyone can now view active ads from Pages on Facebook. The feature will allow our community in Pakistan – and around the world – to see ads across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and our partner network, even if those ads aren’t shown to you. People can also learn more about Pages, even if they don’t advertise. For example, you can see any recent name changes and the date the Page was created.
We block millions of fake accounts at registration every day, and we continuously build and update our technical systems to make it easier to respond to reports of abuse, detect and remove spam, identify and eliminate fake accounts, and prevent accounts from being compromised. We’ve made recent improvements to recognize these inauthentic accounts more easily by identifying patterns of activity — without assessing account contents themselves. For example, our systems may detect repeated posting of the same content or aberrations in the volume of content creation. In Q1 of this year, we removed nearly 6 million fake accounts globally, 98.5% of which we detected before anyone reported them to us.
We require our community on Facebook to respect our Community Standards, and we hold advertisers to even stricter guidelines. We use both automated and human review, and we’re taking aggressive steps to strengthen both. Reviewing ads means assessing not just the ad’s content, but the context in which it was bought and the intended audience, and we’re changing our ads review system to pay more attention to these signals. This year, we’ve added more people to our global ads review teams and we’re investing more in machine learning to better understand when to flag and take down ads. Also, last year, we stated that we will no longer allow Pages that repeatedly share false news to advertising on Facebook.”
