NEC, monitors say Facebook violated laws on polls day

The National Election Commission yesterday expressed dissatisfaction over the failure of the social-media to heed its call to refrain from campaigning on election day.

“The social media including Facebook failed to cooperate with the Elections Commission on the election day," NEC Commissioner General Saman Sri Ratnayake told the Sunday Times.

He said, however, the NEC would followup on the incidents of violations with the Facebook and other social media companies.

Facebook was flooded with partisan posts and politically targeted paid advertisements.

In the run- up to the election, two People's Action for Free and Fair Elections ( PAFFREL) teams monitored a real- time “dashboard” that showed the most trending posts from more than 11,000 Facebook pages and groups. They recorded 1,694 election laws violations, including politically targetted paid advertisements and illegal political propaganda activities. Most of them are still active on the platforms.

The postings were seen on Sinhala, Tamil and English pages run by political parties or on behalf of presidential candidates, gossip pages and meme pages.

“Once our technical teams identified pages with content that spread hate speech, misinformation, or in other ways violated election laws, our legal officers scrutinised the material before sending it to the NEC for the commission to take it up with the Facebook management,” PAFFREL Chief Rohana Hettiarachchie said.

Besides PAFFREL, special teams from the Centre for Monitoring Election Violence ( CMEV) and a five-member team European Union’s Election Observation Mission ( EU EOM) team also monitored the social media closely during the polls.

NEC officials said Facebook acted quickly in maintaining its Community Standards over hate speech but not over misinformation campaigns reported to it.

Facebook, the world’s richest social media site, has come under severe criticism after credible evidence emerged about the influencing role it played during the 2016 presidential election in the United States and the Brexit referendum in Britain.

Facebook earns revenue by tracking the user data of billions of its users worldwide and through targeted paid advertisements on the platform.