How Facebook gets ready for the next US elections?
Cambridge Analytica, The Great Hack, Data Breaches — all these were very hot topics not long ago, and lots of people agree that these scandals started to go viral after the 2016 US elections. This year the US elections will happen again, politicians already started their campaigns, and things are going to get hotter and hotter.
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We want to take a look at Facebook — the company that most blamed for leaks that “lead” to the outcome of 2016 elections — what are they doing? In October 2019 Facebook released the article “Helping to Protect the 2020 US Elections”, where they described all actions they are taking to ensure that things will work fair.
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1 — Transparency is our all. FB made things way more clear. Pages now can show verified owners, State-controlled media got labels, political ads show the budget that candidates spent on it — all these actions were taken towards allowing people to check information more clearly so that then they can decide on things themselves.
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2 — Find bad guys and eliminate them. Foreign intervention to elections is a serious problem: these attacks are happening in a “hitman” way with fake pages manipulating through making certain posts, comments, likes, etc. FB finds those and blocks accounts, also removing all the content and activities generated by them. Besides that, the updated policies regulate the inauthentic behavior, so new coordinated groups would have a harder time to exist.
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3: Check facts. With things transparent and (almost) no bad guys, the last step is to ensure that the content that people are consuming and sharing is not a fake. For this purpose, FB uses a set of Third-party independent services: for checking faking news without being FB who decides what should be considered true or not.
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For the full post, check “Helping to Protect the 2020 US Elections” on about.fb.com
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We are living in a new era with unprecedented cases — many things have never happened before. There is no one else to judge and to rationalize except us — people of today, so we need to be critical but sensible. With this in mind, we want to ask you — do you think it’s enough, too much or too few actions for upcoming events?