Facebook vows to help Pakistan in upcoming elections of 2018

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook‘s CEO has announced that the company will be using advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and employment of a large number of people, to help strengthen its security features. The company plans to keep the platform’s focus centralized on the confidentiality of upcoming elections in Pakistan and other countries.

Zuckerberg added that several countries, including Pakistan, will hold elections in the coming months of 2018 and therefore, his company is working on focusing on confidentiality and prevent abnormal data such as fake news to be used. This will allow fairness and transparency in the upcoming elections. 
Facebook will be making sure that no agencies or entities, especially the Internet Research Agency (IRA) of Russia, will be allowed to manipulate the people by spreading false news and misleading content to influence elections of 2018. Zuckerberg emphasized on IRA because it previously used this strategy to influence voters in several countries. IRA made hundreds of fake accounts and posted deceptive content to spread propaganda. In a crackdown against IRA, Facebook took down over 250 accounts and pages of the misinformation agency.

The CEO said that the company is working on making its security systems more effective. The systems will now use AI to delete posts that are fake as well as inauthentic accounts. He added,

“We have improved our techniques to prevent nation states from interfering in foreign elections, and we’ve built more advanced AI tools to remove fake accounts more generally. There have been a number of important elections since then where these new tools have been successfully deployed.We have also significantly increased our investment in security. We now have about 15,000 people working on security and content review. We’ll have more than 20,000 by the end of this year.”

When Facebook- Cambridge Analytica breach came to light, it was reported that over 50 million accounts have been violated to extract personal data without user consent and since then the company is deploying safeguards to protect user data. In the past couple of days, Facebook has put an end to targetted ads using emails attained without consent and no more allows third-party applications to access user data. You can check out Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook post, here.

Do you think Facebook can help Pakistan in the upcoming elections? Let us know in the comments below.