Facebook to create ‘war room’ to fight fake news
Facebook will tackle political misinformation in the run-up to the EU elections this May with a new “war room” based in Dublin, the company’s incoming communications chief, Nick Clegg, has announced.
In his first speech as Facebook’s top public face, Clegg said the company would be setting up an “operations centre focused on elections integrity, based in Dublin, this spring”. The centre will build on the company’s previous experience running an “elections war room” in its US office, where it coordinated efforts to police the platform during the US midterm and Brazilian presidential elections.
“This approach will help boost our rapid response efforts to fight misinformation, bringing together dozens of experts from across the company – including from our threat intelligence, data science, engineering, research, community operations and legal teams,” Clegg said.
“They will work closely with the lawmakers, election commissions, other tech companies, academics and civil society groups to continue the fight against fake news, prevent the spread of voter suppression efforts and further integrate the large number of teams working on these important issues across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.”
In his speech, made to an audience of European policymakers in Brussels and livestreamed on Facebook, Clegg accepted that the company had erred in the past, but said it was on a path of improvement. “What I have seen in my short time at Facebook is a young company – only 15 years old next month – which has grown at a startling pace, has undoubtedly made mistakes and is now entering a new phase of reform, responsibility and change.”
The former Liberal Democrat leader said Facebook had worked to bolster its content review team, with more than 30,000 people around the world working on security and safety on the site.
Clegg also said the company was continuing to work on “a way for people to appeal against content decisions to an independent entity sitting outside of the company” – a content review board once described by his boss, Mark Zuckerberg, as a “supreme court” of Facebook. Clegg added that Facebook would soon be publishing a draft charter for the board and opening it up to input from experts.
However, later in the hour-long speech, Clegg went on the offensive, arguing that “we must avoid legitimate questions about data-driven businesses evolving into an outright rejection of data sharing and innovation”, and echoing Zuckerberg’s regular warning that attempts to clamp down on data harvesting by American businesses risk handing the future of innovation to China.
“The Chinese approach could well lead to some large-scale improvements like better health outcomes – benefits derived from the mass capture and analysis of data – but it could equally be put to more sinister surveillance ends, as we have seen with the Chinese government’s controversial social credit system,” Clegg said.
When he was hired in late 2018, Clegg said he had decided to take the role after deciding there was nothing more he could do in the fight against Brexit.
“The Brexit drama will soon move to – and possibly culminate in – the place where it arguably belonged all along, in parliament. I will no longer seek to play a public role in that debate,” he wrote in a Guardian article explaining his decision.
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