Daily Times

KARACHI: Facebook is working in collaboration with the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) to further understand and address the specific challenges in Pakistan and gear up its efforts to prevent abuse, revealed the social networking company in an official statement.

“It is increasing the number of people working on safety and security issues around the world to 20,000 people by the end of the year, as it employed dedicated teams working on all of the world’s upcoming elections , including Pakistan, to help detect and prevent malicious actors or abuse on Facebook,” read the statement.

According to the statement, Facebook will be taking steps ahead of the July 25th election to curb false news on Facebook. According to the company, a combination of technology and human review would be used to combat false news and prevent misinformation from spreading.

“We know that people want to see accurate information on Facebook and so do we. We also know that misinformation is harmful to our community and makes the world less informed, particularly in the context of elections. We can’t combat false news alone – we believe it requires a concerted effort across industry, academics, civil society and government, but we are absolutely committed to playing our part,” said the issued statement.

The statement then went on to expand on the mechanism used by Facebook to control false news. According to the company, it would employee a mix of technology and human review as well as arm its community with the ability to recognize what might be false to combat the spread of misleading information on social media.

In the issued statement, Facebook announced that it will begin a pilot of Third Party Fact Checking in Pakistan. “Third Party Fact Checking is one of the ways we are fighting misinformation and our partners are well-respected fact-checkers who have been certified by Poynter’s non-partisan International Fact-Checking Network,” explained the statement.

The statement explained that one of the ways the company would be predicting false news would be through the use of ‘signals’ including feedback from people on Facebook.. “When fact-checkers rate a story as false,” continued the statement “we significantly reduce its distribution in News Feed, dropping future views on average by more than 80 percent. Pages and domains that repeatedly share false news will also see their distribution reduced and their ability to monetize and advertise removed.”

“When third-party fact-checkers write articles about the accuracy of a news story, we show these articles in Related Articles immediately below the story in News Feed. We also send people and Page Admins notifications if they try to share a story or have shared one in the past that’s been determined to be false.

We want to empower people to decide for themselves what to read, trust, and share, and we do this by promoting news literacy and providing people with more context,” the statement explained.

In the issued statement, the company also mentioned that it was partnering with Media Matters for Democracy and EngagePakistan to develop and distribute localized versions of its ‘false news tips’ in order to raise awareness among the users regarding how to recognize and report false news. “This week, we will be posting a Public Service Announcement at the top of News Feed – visible to our entire Facebook community in Pakistan , with a link to these false news tips,” read the statement.

“Fake accounts can be a major distributor of harmful and misleading content, and we work hard to keep them off the platform,” continued the statement. “We block millions of fake accounts at registration every day, and we continuously build and update our technical systems to make it easier to respond to reports of abuse, detect and remove spam, identify and eliminate fake accounts, and prevent accounts from being compromised,” it added.

“We’ve made recent improvements to recognize these inauthentic accounts more easily by identifying patterns of activity, without assessing account contents themselves. For example, our systems may detect repeated posting of the same content, or aberrations in the volume of content creation. In Q1 of this year, we removed nearly 6 million fake accounts globally, 98.5% of which we detected before anyone reported them to us,” said Facebook in its statement.

The statement also recounted the steps Facebook was taking to ensure transparency. “We’re taking significant steps to bring more transparency to ads and Pages on Facebook. Anyone can now view active ads from Pages on Facebook. The feature will allow our community in Pakistan, and around the world – to see ads across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and our partner network, even if those ads aren’t shown to you. People can also learn more about Pages, even if they don’t advertise. For example, you can see any recent name changes and the date the Page was created” said the statement.

“We require our community on Facebook to respect our Community Standards, and we hold advertisers to even stricter guidelines. We use both automated and human review, and we’re taking aggressive steps to strengthen both. Reviewing ads means assessing not just the ad’s content, but the context in which it was bought and the intended audience, and we’re changing our ads review system to pay more attention to these signals. This year, we’ve added more people to our global ads review teams and we’re investing more in machine learning to better understand when to flag and take down ads. Also, last year, we stated that we will no longer allow Pages that repeatedly share false news to advertise on Facebook,” said the statement.

“We believe Facebook has an important part to play in creating an informed community, and helping people access all the information they need to take part in the democratic process. Ahead of Election Day, we will serve the community with a vote reminder, which will appear as a megaphone at the top of their News Feed. In addition, we are also working to secure candidate and party Pages to protect them from hacking and impersonation, and will be sending out security emails to admins of such pages, as well as launching an election integrity website for candidates and parties in Pakistan,” mentioned the statement.

According to the statement, the election integrity website would offer tips and best practices in both English and Urdu for politicians and political parties on how to engage their followers and keep their Facebook Pages and accounts safe.

“We recognise the importance of working closely with local authorities to encourage civic participation in local elections. We have been working proactively with Election Commission of Pakistan to help support their effort to maintain the integrity of the election” reiterated the statement before mentioning that Facebook was also educating Election Commission officials on how to effectively use the social media platform.

“Facebook has helped educate Election Commission officials on how our platform works with the goal of increasing transparency, improving security, and promoting civic engagement. We are also exploring new ways of working with the Election Commission of Pakistan to share a reminder about the ECP’s 8300 Voter SMS service, which is designed to give Pakistanis easy access to their voter record and polling station,” said the statement.

“Protecting elections from abuse on our platform is one of the most important things we’re working on at Facebook at the moment. We know there’s more to do, and we will continue to work hard to ensure that Facebook can play a positive and constructive role in Pakistan’s democratic process, both in 2018 and in the long-term” concluded the statement issued by the social media giant.

Published in Daily Times, July 11^th 2018.