With the upcoming elections in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Goa and Manipur starting February 10, Meta is sharing an update on how Meta is prepared to protect people and its platform during this period.
Meta has a comprehensive strategy in place for the elections, which includes detecting and removing hate speech and content that incites violence, reducing the spread of misinformation, making political advertising more transparent, partnering with election authorities to remove content that violates local law and helping people make their voices heard through voting. Meta we’ll be activating its Elections Operations Center so it can monitor and respond to potential abuses that emerge related to these elections in real time.
Since 2018, Meta used this model for major elections around the world. It brings together subject matter experts from across the company – including from its threat intelligence, data science, engineering, research, operations, policy and legal teams – to give it more visibility of emerging threats. Meta has invested more than $13 billion in teams and technology. This has allowed it to triple the size of the global team working on safety and security to over 40,000 including 15,000+ dedicated content reviewers across 70 languages. For India, Meta has reviewers in 20 Indian languages.
Meta knows that it is important for people to see accurate information across all its apps, which is why it continues to fight the spread of misinformation on Meta’s services in India. Meta has introduced a number of tools that provide more information about political ads on Facebook and Instagram. Meta will also be offering Election Day reminders to give voters accurate information and encourage them to share this information with friends on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
In 2019, led by the industry body IAMAI, Meta had set up a high priority channel with Election Commission of India for Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, to receive content-related escalations and to remove content that violates local law after receiving valid legal orders. WhatsApp actively constrains virality on the platform. Meta’s advanced spam detection technology works round the clock to spot and take action on accounts engaging in automated and bulk messaging. It banned over 2 million accounts in the month of December 2021 alone. From time to time, Meta runs multiple awareness campaigns like ‘Share Joy, Not Rumours’ and ‘Check it before you share it’ to remind people about double-checking facts. Ahead of all elections, Meta trains political parties about the responsible use of WhatsApp.
