*LOS ANGELES: Facebook has now deployed technology tools like artificialintelligence and thousands of people to work on security as the company’s“major focus” this year is to protect the integrity of upcoming electionsin Pakistan and a few other countries.*
According to Zuckerberg, the year 2018 is a big year for elections andFacebook is enhancing its security features to prevent the spreading ofmisleading information.
“In the US Senate Alabama special election last year, we successfullydeployed some new artificial intelligence (AI) tools that removedMacedonian trolls who were trying to spread information during theelection. We now have about 15,000 people working on security and contentreview and we’ll have more than 20,000 by the end of this year,” Zuckerbergtold reporters during a conference call.
“This is going to be a big year for elections ahead with the US midtermsand elections in India, Brazil, Mexico, Pakistan, Hungary, and others. Thisis going to be a major focus for us,” he said.
Zuckerberg said Facebook had taken big steps by taking down Russia’sInternet Research Agency (IRA) pages that were targeting the US. “Since webecame aware of their activity after the 2016 US elections, we’ve beenworking to root out the IRA and protect the integrity of elections aroundthe world,” he said.
“There have been a number of important elections that we’ve focused on. Afew months after the 2016 elections, there was a French presidentialelection and leading up to that we deployed some new AI tools that tookdown more than 30,000 fake accounts….In German election, the companydeveloped a new playbook for working with the local election commission onshare information on threats it received, he said.
“We have more work to do here and we’re going to continue working very hardto defend against them. There’s the Mexican presidential election, thereare big elections in India and Brazil as well as in Pakistan and Hungaryand a number of other countries and the US midterms, of course,” he said.
Zuckerberg pointed out three different types of activity that requireddifferent strategies for fighting.
“Economic actors, who are basically spammers, the second are governmentstrying to interfere in elections, and then the third is just polarizationand sometimes lack of truthfulness in what you’ve described as the media,If we just make it so that the economics stop working for them then they’llmove on to something else.
I mean, these are literally the same type of people who had been sendingyou Viagra e-mails in the ’90s. We can attack it on both sides. On therevenue side, we make it so that they can’t run the Facebook ad network,”he said.