Facebook vows to ensure that news articles, posts don't sway India's polls

Under fire from the Indian government on charges of influencing elections, Facebook on Tuesday said views on politics and political parties would be vetted carefully to ensure that news articles and posts did not sway polls.

The social media giant said it was working internally as well as through third parties to prevent misinformation from making its way to the platform. 

“We take it very seriously. There is an election integrity effort going on in Facebook. We are dealing with misinformation and disinformation on our service. It is on top of mind for us. We are internationalising the tools. It is particularly important in the context of elections,” said Monika Bickert, vice-president of global product management at Facebook.

“We rely on third-party fact-checking. We have launched one such service in India. We are very much dependent on external parties, fact-checking arms that are internationally certified to determine if the content is true or not,” Bickert said.

General elections are scheduled to be held in the country next year.

Recently, amid the controversy surrounding Cambridge Analytica and Facebook on the data breach issue, Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said the government would not tolerate any unauthorised use of data for abuse or to influence elections. He had warned that the government would act tough against anybody abusing data for collateral purposes.

As a pilot, Facebook is working with a third-party fact-checking site in the run-up to Karnataka elections to ensure that social media was not used to influence elections. “Aimed to fight the spread of false news on our platform, we have partnered with BOOM, an independent digital journalism initiative, for a pilot programme, which will first roll out in Karnataka. We have learned that once a story is rated as false, we have been able to reduce its distribution by 80 per cent, and thereby improve accuracy of information on Facebook and reduce misinformation,” the company stated on its website.

When a fact-checker rates a story as false, Facebook will show it lower in News Feed, significantly reducing its distribution. This in turn stops the hoax from spreading and reduces the number of people who see it.

In a first, Facebook made public guidelines its moderators use to decide which post, news article it would remove for violence, spam, harassment, self-harm, terrorism, intellectual property theft, and hate speech from social network.