Share experiences from Brazil war room, EC tells FB
NEW DELHI : The election commission (EC) has asked social media giant Facebook to share its experiences of running a war room in Brazil, through which the company could monitor and take action against posts that could potentially impact the election outcome.
According to a senior functionary of the poll panel--which conducts assembly and general elections—a team from FB met EC officials on Friday to apprise them of the efforts that were made during the recent elections in Brazil where data scientists, engineers and policy experts collaborated in the ‘war room’ that was set up to monitor trends.
“FB functionaries said they would like to replicate the Brazil model during the upcoming assembly elections to see how posts that can vitiate the polling process can be taken down and prevented from going viral. This experience will come in handy when the country goes to polls in 2019,” the functionary quoted above said.
The commission, it is learnt, has asked FB to share the details of the war room and how the company could spot and take action against content that could fall in the domain of hate-speech or paid news or even act as inducement.
India is a key market for Facebook with 217 million people using the platform every month.
The EC has set up a committee to suggest changes to Section 126 of the Representation of People’s Act, 1951 in view of the impact social media has on electioneering. Section 126 prohibits displaying any election matter by means of television or similar apparatus, during the period of 48 hours before polls in a constituency.
The panel was set up in December last year after the EC took cognisance of parties violating provisions of Section 126. It also had the mandate to examine how media platforms could be regulated during the 48 hours before voting in a multi-phase election.
“The commission will incorpo- rate the feedback from FB and come up with guidelines that address the concerns of all stakeholders, including the politicians and the media,” the functionary said.
FB and EC have already discussed examining and blocking political advertisement during the last 48 hours before elections in the country.
While FB refused to comment on Friday’s meeting, Richard Allan, vice president of policy solutions earlier told HT that they plan to set up a global war room in India because a lot of the people that we need are distributed in different locations. “It’s a virtual war room, in the sense we have a group of people, so the security specialists maybe based in one country, the content specialists maybe based in another country, they come together and they are looking for threats. ..”