Facebook fights fakery in bustling ‘War Room’
Monitors, fact checkers busy in election season
MENLO PARK, Calif. — In an otherwise-innocuous part of Facebook’s Silicon Valley campus, a locked door bears a sign that reads “War Room.” Behind the door lies a nerve center the social network set up to combat fake accounts and bogus news stories ahead of upcoming elections.
Inside the room are dozens of employees staring at monitors while information streams across giant dashboards. On the walls are posters of the sort Facebook uses to caution or exhort employees.
Days after Donald Trump’s electoral victory, CEO Mark Zuckerberg brushed off assertions that the outcome had been influenced by fictional news stories on Facebook.
But Facebook’s blase attitude shifted as criticism mounted in Congress and elsewhere. Later that year, it acknowledged having run thousands of ads promoting false information placed by Russian agents.
The war room is a major part of Facebook’s ongoing repairs. Its technology draws upon the artificial intelligence system Facebook has been using to help identify “inauthentic” posts and user behavior.
More than 20 teams now coordinate the efforts of more than 20,000 people — mostly contractors — devoted to blocking fake accounts and fictional news. Facebook has hired fact checkers, including The Associated Press, to vet new stories posted on its social network.
Facebook credits its war room and other stepped-up patrolling efforts for booting 1.3 billion fake accounts over the past year.
But it remains unclear whether Facebook is doing enough, said Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters For America, a liberal group that monitors misinformation. He noted that the sensational themes distributed in fictional news stories can keep people “engaged” on Facebook — which in turn makes it possible to sell more of the ads that generate most of Facebook’s revenue.