Facebook urged to help clean up Libyan presidential contest
A candidate in Libya’s presidential election called on Facebook and other social media platforms to clean up information shared about a race that he said was overshadowed by populists, vote-buying and rule-breaking.
Without identifying his rivals by name, Aref Nayed accused Libyan politicians of using forums such as Facebook and Clubhouse to sow division and intimidate members of the country’s electoral commission.
“This kind of behaviour should not be tolerated. Platforms like Facebook should monitor for such threatening discourse and should shut down these people,” Mr Nayed told a US think tank on Thursday.
“International monitoring and implementation of sanctions against people who tried to sabotage them are necessary in order to have timely, transparent, clean and peaceful elections.”
A Facebook spokesman said independent fact-checkers were employed by the company to assess content in Libya and were warning users of fake news.
“We have a dedicated team with experts in misinformation and hate speech working to stop abuse on our platforms in the lead up to, during and after the elections in Libya,” the Facebook representative told The National.
“We also have content reviewers from Libya to help us remove harmful content, as well as proactive detection technology to help us catch violating content at scale.”
Mr Nayed, a former Libyan ambassador to the UAE, businessman and head of the liberal Ihya Libya (Reviving Libya) party, is one of a growing list of candidates for the first round of voting which is set for December 24.
Others include interim prime minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, who filed his papers yesterday; Fathi Bashagha, a former minister; Saif Al Islam Qaddafi, a son of the country’s deposed leader Muammar Qaddafi and wanted by the International Criminal Court, and Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, an eastern-based army commander.
The election is part of the country’s UN-backed transition following a decade of war. Still, the vote faces growing uncertainty even after high-level talks in Paris last week aimed at buttressing the electoral process.
Mr Nayed, who claims he wants to rebuild Libya as a modern, pluralist society free of foreign forces in which human rights violators are held accountable, said the North African country faced an uphill struggle.
“There is a lot of very hard work that has to be done on the nuts and bolts of the economy, to introduce prosperity for everyone, instead of a very small elite stealing all the revenue of the country and leaving everybody else hungry,” Mr Nayed said.