Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is gearing up to monitor and combat potential abuse of the platform around the elections. Five states - Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Goa and Manipur - have set out to select their new governments.
Facebook has 410 million users and Instagram has 210 million users in the country. Messaging platform WhatsApp has close to 530 million users.
In a blog, Meta said that it will activate its Elections Operations Center to monitor and respond to potential abuses that we see emerging related to these elections in real time.
“Since 2018, we’ve used this model for major elections around the world. It brings together subject matter experts from across the company – including from our threat intelligence, data science, engineering, research, operations, policy and legal teams — to give us more visibility of emerging threats. That way we can respond quickly before they become larger,” said the blog.
The company has also partnered with 10 third-party fact-checkers in India to review and rate the accuracy of such content in 11 Indian languages. The company also has a global team of 40,000 including over 15,000 content reviewers working on safety and security across 70 languages. For India, Meta has reviewers in 20 Indian languages.
To improve transparency of political advertising, Facebook and Instagram have additional tools such ‘Paid by For’ disclaimers, which was introduced in December 2021 for ads about elections or politics, under social issues.
The company is also launching security campaign before elections to remind users to protect their accounts against online threats by activating two-factor authentication. "This will be available in three Indian languages, including Hindi,” the company said in a blog.
On its messaging app WhatsApp, it uses advanced spam detection technology to spot and take action on accounts engaging in automated and bulk messaging. This has resulted in banning of over 2 million accounts in December 2021 alone, Meta said in the blog.
“We know that the election periods are contentious and they can often be unpredictable. So, while we head into these elections in India prepared and ready to meet the challenges we know will be present, we’re also ready to adapt to changing circumstances and unforeseen events. We won’t hesitate to take additional steps if necessary to protect this important exercise of democracy in India and keep our platform and the Indian people safe before, during, and after the voting ends,” Meta said.
Apart from Meta, ShareChat and Koo are two homegrown social media platforms where significant political leaders are present. ShareChat, which also owns short video platform Moj, has close to 340 million, and Koo, 20 million users.
Meta, ShareChat and Koo are a part of the election commission’s voluntary code of work to ensure integrity in Indian elections.
In the case of Indian social media platforms, a ShareChat spokesperson said that it partners with multiple third-party fact-checkers, including BoomLive, Factly, NewsChecker and others, to help identify and tag misinformation on the platform in 12 Indic languages, including Marathi and Hindi. It also uses technology to flag problematic content, and work with large teams, in-house and external, for content moderation.
“We also aggressively take actions against accounts and in many instances permanently ban user accounts that attempt to spam or otherwise misuse the platform in violation of our terms of service and community guidelines. In the month of December 2021 alone, we took action against 1,73,648 accounts on the platform,” the ShareChat spokesperson said in a statement.
“The team at Koo is working to create a link from the Koo website to reputed fact checkers who have the resources and training to detect and call out fake news, thereby enabling users to fact-check Koos (tweet equivalent). Moreover, we constantly monitor the Koo platform for bots or spam accounts, which typically proliferate misinformation. Such accounts are taken down on identification,” Koo spokesperson said in a statement.
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