Facebook talks election security after tough week

Facebook Inc. announced a series of new measures to harden the platform against misinformation Thursday, saying it has needed to ban a Macedonia-based ring spreading fake news during the late 2017 Alabama senate race, and will now start fact-checking photos and video, according to a transcript of a press event published by the social media company on Thursday. That followed earlier announcements about other changes the company is making that appeared to do little to dampen some Canadian parliamentarians’ plans to investigate recent controversies involving the platforms. “Rather than wait for reports from our community, we now proactively look for potentially harmful types of election-related activity, such as Pages of foreign origin that are distributing inauthentic civic content,” said Samidh Chakrabarti, product manager at Facebook at the press event. He explained the company had detected activity by the Macedonian-based “spammers” and swiftly banned them from the platform. As well, Facebook will begin warning people who share information third party fact-checkers have determined to be untrue, said product manager of News Feed, Tessa Lyons. Fact-checkers will be deployed to verify “photos and videos, in addition to links. We’re starting in France with the AFP and will be scaling to more countries and partners soon,” she said. Using a feature already launched in Canada, Facebook said it would expand the availability of tools for people to learn more about the ads they see and the ads published by organizations on the platform. Product management director, Rob Leathern, told the event the advertising transparency tools will be available globally this summer. It has been a challenging few days for the online platform. Earlier this week, Facebook told its users it will place privacy settings more prominently on its options menu, according to a blog post. It also temporarily stopped letting app makers join its platform, Facebook said in its developer news section. On top of all that, after the current privacy scandal, Canadians’ public opinion of the social media company has dropped. MPs in Ottawa were still keen to have the company’s representatives testify in front of the House ethics committee. Conservative MP and ethics committee member Peter Kent told reports in a scrum on Wednesday that the changes announced earlier in the week “won't stop our formal study into what went on with Cambridge Analytica, questions about , questions about Zuckerberg's reluctance to testify and then his admission... of being at fault.” Kent also referenced the large fines companies will face for privacy breaches after the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into effect, as a possible power for the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, according to a transcript. On the same day, NDP MP Charlie Angus reiterated his request for someone from Facebook to speak to a committee, but though he admitted it was unlikely the House could convince Zuckerberg to appear. He did mention AggregateIQ’s co-founder Jeff Silvester, and whistleblower Christopher Wylie as targets for testimony. Members of the NDP recently put forward a motion which would create a digital rights framework. On March 22, Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, standing in for Angus, proposed a motion during an ethics committee meeting to look into the matters concerning Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. It was passed by the committee, according to the transcript of the meeting on the committee’s website.

Facebook talks election security after tough week

Brief | March 29, 2018

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Facebook talks election security after tough week

Brief | March 29, 2018

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