Facebook on guard in Quebec election

Despite there being no sign of a co-ordinated effort to influence the Quebec election, Facebook says it is working to prevent the spread of disinformation and fake accounts on its platform as Aug. 23, the official start of the campaign, looms.

Kevin Chan, Facebook Canada’s head of public policy, said Tuesday that Facebook is providing resources to the administrators of major political parties to help them keep their accounts secure so they don’t fall victim to hackers with bad intentions. If they think they’re being targeted, Chan said that Facebook has an emergency email for politicians to contact to regain control of their online profiles.

“If someone gains access to a prominent politician’s Facebook page, you can see why they’d want to be able to quickly regain control of that account,” Chan said.

The emergency line of communication is being tested in Canada and has yet to be used.

Chan cited multiple examples of Russian interference in American 2016 presidential elections, adding that there’s been no sign of a coordinated attempt to perform similar feats in Canada.

Still since June, Facebook has been trying to crack down on false or misleading content by working with fact checkers from AgenceFrance-presse (AFP).

AFP fact checkers independently verify news stories and other posts flagged by users as potentially misleading or untrue. If AFP disputes the truth of a post it will not be removed; it will be labelled as “disputed by third parties” and Facebook’s algorithms will prioritize other content on users’ news feeds.

“We are reducing the amount of content that doesn’t necessarily violate our community norms but that wears away at the authenticity of our platform,” Chan said. “If an online article is judged false by fact checkers it will be seen by many fewer people.”

In October 2017, Facebook unveiled it’s Canadian Election Integrity Initiative: a direct response to a report from the Communications Security Establishment (CSE). The report, titled Threats to Canada’s Democratic Process, explains ways that Canada’s elections could be tampered with.

“Canada is not immune,” it reads. “In 2015, during the federal election, Canada’s democratic process was targeted by low-sophistication cyber-threat activity. It is highly probable that the perpetrators were hacktivists and cybercriminals.”

The report goes on to suggest that outside parties will try to influence Canadian elections in 2019.

“While much of this activity will be low sophistication, we expect that some ‘influence activities’ will be wellplanned and target more than one aspect of the democratic process,” the report says.

The official provincial election campaign kicks off this Thursday. Election day is Oct. 1.