Mark Zuckerberg has said Facebook is enhancing its security features to ensure the integrity of upcoming key elections in countries like India on its platform, as the social media giant faced flak over a major data breach scandal by a British firm linked to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
Zuckerberg, in an interview with The New York Times , referred to the artificial intelligence (AI) tools deployed by Facebook to detect fake accounts trying to manipulate news and influence the elections.
Such a tool was deployed for the first time in the French elections in 2017.
“The new A.I. tools we built after the 2016 elections found, I think, more than 30,000 fake accounts that we believe were linked to Russian sources who were trying to do the same kind of tactics they did in the US in the 2016 election. We were able to disable them and prevent that from happening on a large scale in France, he said.
Polls and social media
“Last year in 2017 with the special election in Alabama, we deployed some new A.I. tools to identify fake accounts and false news, and we found a significant number of Macedonian accounts that were trying to spread false news, and were able to eliminate those, Zuckerberg said.
This is for the first time that Zuckerberg has publicly talked about Facebook being allegedly used for influencing polls.
“This is a massive focus for us to make sure we’re dialed in for not only the 2018 elections in the US, but the Indian elections, the Brazilian elections, and a number of other elections that are going on this year that are really important,” Zuckerberg said.
Responding to a question, he said there is a lot of hard work that the Facebook needs to do to make it harder for countries like Russia to do election interference, to make it so that trolls and other folks can’t spread fake news.
“But we can get in front of this, and we have a responsibility to do this not only for the 2018 midterms in the US, which are going to be a huge deal this year, and that’s just a huge focus of us. But there’s a big election in India this year,” Zuckerberg said.
India yesterday warned Facebook of “stringent” action for any attempt to influence polls by allowing data theft and even threatened to summon Zuckerberg if needed.
The warning came as the BJP yesterday attacked Congress, questioning the party’s relations with Cambridge Analytica, accused of harvesting personal data from 50 million Facebook users without their knowledge.
Congress, however, asserted that the services of the London-based company have never been hired by his party or its chief Rahul Gandhi.
“One of the big commitments that we’ve made this year is to double the number of people working on security at the company. We’re going to have 20,000 people working on security and content review in this company by the end of this year,” said the Facebook founder and CEO.
Regulation
Responding to a question, Zuckerberg said he is not sure of regulation on Facebook.
“I actually am not sure we shouldn’t be regulated. You know, I think in general, technology is an increasingly important trend in the world, and I actually think the question is more what is the right regulation rather than yes or no, should it be regulated? he asked.
Zuckerberg has apologised for a “major breach of trust” with Facebook users and vowed to take steps to protect user data. He admitted of making “mistakes” and said he was “happy” to answer questions about the scandal before US Congress.
He said Facebook has already taken important steps to prevent such a situation from happening again. He said the site would be reviewing thousands of apps in an “intensive process.