In poll season, Facebook will give people hoax alarm: Samidh Chakrabarti

With the general elections kicking off in two weeks, Facebook has launched several India-specific initiatives to ensure that no misinformation is spread through the platform. Samidh Chakrabarti, Facebook’s director of product management for civic integrity, tells Neha Alawadhi about the slew of steps the social media giant has taken in its battle against fake news. Edited excerpts:  

What steps are you taking ahead of the Indian election?

Starting this week, we are going to roll out products that we call ‘Candidate Connect’. It’s integrated within Facebook, and is an experience that allows people to view and compare videos from candidates. We invite candidates to upload short videos on a few structured topics, like generally introducing yourself and detailing past achievements to show that he/she will do a good job. Candidates can use Facebook to directly upload these videos on such topics.

Is there a team to check the content being uploaded on these videos?

All the content being uploaded should meet our community standards.

How is your partnership with fact checkers in India?

We have seven fact checking partners here — more than what we have in any other country. When any of these fact checkers mark something as a hoax, we inform people on Facebook if they come across that content. One of the India-specific measures we're rolling out is that if someone comes across a video or an image that has been debunked by a fact checker, we are putting a screen in front of it that notifies the user that it is has been debunked by a third party. The user can go and read what the third party has to say. He/she can still dismiss the screen and view the content.

How different is the election experience in India as compared to the US and Brazil?

There are many differences and we really had to adapt and create new strategies to be able to support this election. One of the major differences is the large number of languages and the diversity in India. Even the new feature, Candidate Connect, is available in 12 languages. Also, elections take place very quickly in India from the time they're announced. We have been preparing for this election for a long time. For over a year, we staffed the product team that focused especially on the Indian election. And it is extremely unusual at Facebook for a product team to be regionally focused

Do you have a war room like you had in the US and Brazil?

The operations centre we had in the Brazil and US elections was based in California, and worked extremely well for us. We are opening up two operation centres focusing on elections this year that will work along with the one in Menlo Park. One is in Dublin and another in Singapore. The one in Singapore is primarily supporting the Indian elections. We are bringing together data scientists, engineers, product managers, operations specialists, policy experts within the Singapore office and we'll work closely with our colleagues here in the Delhi office who will be on the ground to be able to respond quickly to issues that are discovered. We will work extensively with different institutional partners here in India also.

How many people are looking at all these efforts combined?

This is a huge effort at Facebook. This is like a top priority. If you add up all the people who are looking at all the efforts in India, you're going to have more than a thousand people.

How are you dealing with multiple languages? Is it more of a manual effort?

It’s a tough challenge, but we are dealing with it in two ways. One is we have expanded our team to ensure there are people to cover a wide variety of languages. It is not just about language fluency. It’s cultural context also that helps make good content moderation decisions. On the technology and product side, we have been extending the range of classifiers to support many more languages than there were before. They will be there in perpetuity even after elections are over.