As the world’s largest democracy prepares for the 18th General Elections, Meta (erstwhile Facebook) will continue efforts to limit misinformation, remove voter interference, and enhance transparency and accountability on its platforms to support free and fair elections, the company said on Tuesday.

“Towards this, we have around 40,000 people globally working on safety and security, with more than $20 billion invested in teams and technology in this area since 2016,” it said adding that this includes 15,000 content reviewers who review content across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads in more than 70 languages — including 20 Indian languages.

The company said it is also “closely engaged with the Election Commission of India via the Voluntary Code of Ethics” that it joined in 2019, which gives the Commission a high priority channel to flag unlawful content to Meta.

“We are dedicated to responsible use of new technologies like GenAI and collaborating with industry stakeholders on technical standards for AI detection, as well as combating the spread of deceptive AI content in elections through the Tech Accord,” the Mark Zuckerberg owned company said.

More recently, the company has committed to taking a responsible approach to new technologies like GenAI and it will be drawing on all of these resources in the run up to the elections.

“As for all major elections, we’ll also activate an India-specific Elections Operations Center, bringing together experts from across the company from our intelligence, data science, engineering, research, operations, content policy and legal teams to identify potential threats and put specific mitigations in place across our apps and technologies in real time,”it further said.

On addressing online misinformation, it said the company removes the most serious kinds of misinformation from Facebook, Instagram and Threads, such as content that could suppress voting, or contribute to imminent violence or physical harm.

“During the Indian elections, based on guidance from local partners, this will include false claims about someone from one religion physically harming or harassing another person or group from a different religion. For content that doesn’t violate these particular policies, we work with independent fact-checking organisations,” the company said.

Meta added that it was continuing to expand the network of independent fact-checkers in the country – from 11 partners across India covering 15 languages, making it one of its largest networks for a country.

Tech-giant Google had also last week announced that it has partnered with the ECI to provide authoritative information on voting processes for the upcoming general elections via Google Search and YouTube videos.

Both Google and Shakti (a pan-India network) will work together to aid in the detection of online misinformation, including deepfakes, and to create a common repository that news publishers can use to tackle the challenges of misinformation at scale, it had said.

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