Not yet adept at tackling poll interferences: FB CEO

Despite its efforts, Facebook cannot yet guarantee that it can stop foreign actors that are trying to interfere in the upcoming European Parliament elections in May, the company CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said.

"We've certainly made a lot of progress in building defences to protect the integrity of elections," Zuckerberg told RTE News in an interview on Tuesday.

"But no, I don't think anyone can guarantee that. In a world where you have nation states that are trying to interfere in elections, there is no single thing that we can do, and say we have now solved the issue," he remarked.

Facebook came under the scanner of policymakers around the world after allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential elections surfaced.

"Here in the EU for the upcoming elections we are bringing the whole battery of all of the strategies and tools that worked very well in a lot of important elections so far," he said.

The Facebook CEO said since the 2016 US presidential elections, a lot of important elections have been relatively clean.

"But I think we should expect that for some of these countries that are out there, that are trying to interfere, they are just going to keep trying. We need to stay head of that and keep on doing this work in order to stay ahead," Zuckerberg said.

When it comes to misinformation, Facebook prioritises reducing the harm it causes and often look at its impacts in the aggregate.

"There are two primary ways we find stories that are likely to be false -- either we use machine learning to detect potentially false stories on Facebook, or else they're identified by our third-party fact-checkers themselves," Antonia Woodford, Product Manager, wrote in a blog post on Tuesday.

"Once a potentially false story has been found -- regardless of how it was identified -- fact-checkers review the claims in the story, rate their accuracy and provide an explanation as to how they arrived at their rating," Woodford said.

--IANS

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