Facebook Opens New Fronts to Combat Political Interference -- 2nd Update
January 28 2019 - 5:37PM
Dow Jones News
By Sam Schechner and Kimberly Chin
Facebook Inc. plans to make more information available
world-wide about political ads purchased on its services, expanding
the social-media giant's effort to defend against politically
motivated interference in elections from India to the European
Union.
The company said Monday that it will take steps to guard against
the spread of fake news and misinformation on its platform in
coming elections, including expanding the reach of a searchable
database of political ads.
The new tools -- similar to those it applied in the run-up to
last year's midterm election in the U.S. -- will be available next
month in India, before expanding to the EU in March ahead of the
bloc's hotly contested parliamentary election spread across over
two dozen countries and languages in May.
The effort is one of the largest and most complex tests of the
company's response to interference in the U.S.'s 2016 presidential
election, when Russian propagandists purchased thousands of
targeted Facebook ads.
This comes at the same time as a broader effort by Facebook to
overhaul how it moderates content on its social network. On Monday,
Facebook described new aspects of how an outside group will review
the company's content decisions, including the board's authority to
reverse internal decisions about whether to allow or remove certain
posts.
The external group could create a buffer between the company and
criticism that its decisions to ban certain kinds of content or
specific users are inconsistent and biased.
In a document that outlines the group's draft charter, Facebook
said it would select up to 40 people globally to serve on the
board. Facebook users can refer questions to the board and the
company will also refer content decisions to it, particularly for
issues that draw public debate or when decisions appear
inconsistent with the company's values.
Facebook's Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg first announced the
decision to form this group in November.
On the misinformation front, in the EU there are growing
concerns that Russia or other foreign actors will seek to sway
national votes for the bloc's parliament, in which euroskeptic,
antiestablishment and extremist candidates are expected to win
significant support.
Nick Clegg, the former British politician hired by Facebook last
year, said in Brussels on Monday that Facebook's new policies are a
result of the company's realization that it had been too slow to
respond to misuse of its tools in 2016.
"We've learned hard lessons," Mr. Clegg said in a speech before
regulators and lobbyists.
The Menlo Park, Calif., company has faced a barrage of criticism
about its data-privacy practices and role in fanning violence in
politically volatile countries such as Myanmar.
Facebook has responded by pivoting to support greater oversight
and regulation by countries around the world. In his speech on
Monday, Mr. Clegg said the EU should come up with a
flexible-but-effective regulatory model that can protect
individuals while serving as an alternative to China's model, which
offers few restrictions on the use of personal information.
"The real choice is between an appropriately regulated tech
sector, balancing the priorities of privacy, free speech,
innovation and scale; and an alternative in which ingenuity runs
roughshod over some basic guarantees of privacy and individual
rights," Mr. Clegg said. "We would like to be at the heart of that
discussion."
When it comes to its work on elections, Facebook said Monday
that under the new rules to prevent foreign interference,
advertisers will have to be authorized to purchase political ads --
even issue-based ads. The company has already created libraries of
political and issue ads for certain countries, including the U.S.
and Brazil. That library will now roll out to other areas, such as
the entire EU, before becoming available globally, the company
said.
The library will include details about individual advertisements
that include the amount spent and the number of people reached, as
well as demographic data on those people. It will be searchable for
as long as seven years.
Facebook also said it would set up two regional operations
centers in Dublin and Singapore to act as hubs to coordinate and
respond to fake news, hate speech and voter suppression across
multiple countries. The company said the hubs would house experts
from Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp to work on these issues.
The hubs will coordinate with a global election-monitoring
office the company opened in its California headquarters last
year.
Earlier this month, Facebook said it had removed about 500 pages
and accounts linked to what it said were two Russia-based
misinformation campaigns. Facebook said one of the campaigns shared
technical overlap with Russia-based activity before the 2018 U.S.
midterm elections, including behavior that shared characteristics
with a Kremlin-aligned organization called the Internet Research
Agency.
In both July and August of 2018, Facebook said it dismantled
influence campaigns originating in Iran and Russia that were
designed to sow division in global politics.
--Daniel Michaels and Georgia Wells contributed to this
article.
Write to Sam Schechner at sam.schechner@wsj.com and Kimberly
Chin at kimberly.chin@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 28, 2019 17:22 ET (22:22 GMT)
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