FB building a ‘war room’ to battle polls meddling

SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook said it will have a “war room” up and running on its Silicon Valley campus to quickly repel efforts to use the social network to meddle in upcoming elections.

“We are setting up a war room in Menlo Park for the Brazil and US elections,” Facebook elections and civic engagement director Samidh Chakrabarti said

“It is going to serve as a command centre so we can make real-time decisions as needed.”

He declined to say when the “war room” – currently a conference room with a paper sign taped to the door – would be in operation.

Teams at Facebook have been honing responses to potential scenarios such as floods of bogus news or campaigns to trick people into falsely thinking they can cast ballots by text message.

“Preventing election interference on Facebook has been one of the biggest cross-team efforts the company has seen,” Chakrabarti said.

The conference call was the latest briefing by Facebook regarding efforts to prevent the kinds of voter manipulation or outright deception that took place ahead of the 2016 election the brought US President Donald Trump to office.

Facebook is better prepared to defend against efforts to manipulate the platform to influence elections and has recently thwarted foreign influence campaigns, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said last week.