Goemkarponn desk
PANAJI: With the upcoming elections in Goa, below is an update on how Meta is prepared to protect people and the platform during this period. A comprehensive strategy is in place for these 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.
Activating Our Elections Operations Center
The Elections Operations Center can monitor and respond to potential abuses that we see emerging related to these elections in real-time.
Since 2018, Meta has used this model for major elections worldwide. It brings together subject matter experts from across the company – including our threat intelligence, data science, engineering, research, operations, policy and legal teams — to give us more visibility of emerging threats. That way the response is quick before they become larger.
Tackling Hate Speech and Other Harmful Content
Meta is aware of how hate speech on our platforms can lead to offline harm. In the backdrop of elections, it is even more important to detect potential hate speech and prevent it from spreading. This is an area that has been prioritized and will continue working to address comprehensively for these elections to help keep people safe.
Meta has invested more than $13 billion in teams and technology. This has allowed Meta 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.
If a piece of content violates the policies against hate speech, we remove it using proactive detection technology or content reviewers’ help. If it doesn’t violate these policies but can still lead to offline harm if it becomes widespread, it is demoted so fewer people see it.
Furthermore, under the existing Community Standards, Meta remove certain slurs that are determined to be hate speech. We are also updating our policies regularly to include additional risk areas. To complement that effort, we may deploy technology to identify new words and phrases associated with hate speech, and either remove posts with that language or reduce their distribution. We also take down accounts of repeat offenders or temporarily reduce the distribution of content from such accounts that have repeatedly violated our policies.
We’ve made significant progress. The prevalence of hate speech on the platform is now down to just 0.03%. But we know there is always more work to be done.
Combating Misinformation, Voter Suppression and Fake News
