Gadgetory

hi I'm Queenie Wong Francini and we just came from face book selection war room ever since the 2016 presidential election the company has really been trying to prove to the public that it can stop election meddling and so we walked into the spaces very intimate room full of about 20 people from different teams operations data scientists researchers that are really working together and working with Facebook's team of 20,000 people to stop election meddling right before the midterm election on the walls we're monitoring both internal and external signals so internally we're looking at for any spikes in user reported content it might be election related such as voter suppression or hate speech externally we're looking at media sources to just get an understanding of what's happening on the ground as well as monitoring any election related content and other social media platforms we need to deal with spam clickbait big news and data misuse that's going to change we have been hard at work for the last two years to make sure that we're far more prepared than we were than in 2016 and so that includes cracking down on fake accounts so as an example there we have actually made huge advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning and we have been able to block in a recent six month period 1.3 billion fake accounts from forming another example is in our work to combat fake news we've really been going after the financial incentives for people to produce fake news in the first place we've reduced clickbait we've reduced the ability for people who run ad forms to be successful on our platform on the whiteboard we kind of have the flow of how the war room should work so any inputs or signals we're receiving come in we make sure that they're thoroughly investigated by threat Intel or data science and then passed off to the right operations team that know our community standards policy and can decide whether or not something should be taken down I think one of the strengths of having everybody in the same place together is just the speed with which we were able to act between detecting a problem in the first place and eventually taking action and typically we found through our experience with the first round of the Brazilian presidential election just a week ago being able to go from detection to action in just a couple of hours so ever since the 2016 presidential election Facebook has obviously been trying to prove to the public that they are better prepared for the upcoming elections and they have been in the past but we'll have to kind of see whether or not this is enough