MENLO PARK, Calif.,
Nov. 7, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- The
following is written by Guy Rosen,
VP of Integrity; Katie Harbath,
Public Policy Director, Global Elections; Nathaniel Gleicher, Head of Cybersecurity Policy
and Rob Leathern, Director of Product Management.
Experience the interactive Multichannel News Release here:
https://www.multivu.com/players/English/8323454-facebook-2020-us-elections/
We have a responsibility to stop abuse and election interference
on our platform. That's why we've made significant investments
since 2016 to better identify new threats, close vulnerabilities
and reduce the spread of viral misinformation and fake
accounts.
Today, almost a year out from the 2020 elections in the US,
we're announcing several new measures to help protect the
democratic process and providing an update on initiatives already
underway:
Fighting foreign interference
- Combating inauthentic behavior, including an updated
policy
- Protecting the accounts of candidates, elected officials, their
teams and others through Facebook Protect
Increasing transparency
- Making Pages more transparent, including showing the confirmed
owner of a Page
- Labeling state-controlled media on their Page and in our Ad
Library
- Making it easier to understand political ads, including a new
US presidential candidate spend tracker
Reducing misinformation
- Preventing the spread of misinformation, including clearer
fact-checking labels
- Fighting voter suppression and interference, including banning
paid ads that suggest voting is useless or advise people not to
vote
- Helping people better understand the information they see
online, including an initial investment of $2 million to support media literacy
projects
Fighting Foreign Interference
Combating Inauthentic Behavior
Over the last three years, we've worked to identify new and
emerging threats and remove coordinated inauthentic behavior across
our apps. In the past year alone, we've taken down over 50 networks
worldwide, many ahead of major democratic elections. As part of our
effort to counter foreign influence campaigns, this morning we
removed four separate networks of accounts, Pages and Groups on
Facebook and Instagram for engaging in coordinated inauthentic
behavior. Three of them originated in Iran and one in Russia. They targeted the US, North Africa and Latin America. We have identified these
manipulation campaigns as part of our internal investigations into
suspected Iran-linked inauthentic
behavior, as well as ongoing proactive work ahead of the US
elections.
We took down these networks based on their behavior, not the
content they posted. In each case, the people behind this activity
coordinated with one another and used fake accounts to misrepresent
themselves, and that was the basis for our action. We have shared
our findings with law enforcement and industry partners. More
details can be found here.
As we've improved our ability to disrupt these operations, we've
also built a deeper understanding of different threats and how best
to counter them. We investigate and enforce against any type of
inauthentic behavior. However, the most appropriate way to respond
to someone boosting the popularity of their posts in their own
country may not be the best way to counter foreign interference.
That's why we're updating our inauthentic behavior policy to
clarify how we deal with the range of deceptive practices we
see on our platforms, whether foreign or domestic, state or
non-state.
Protecting the Accounts of Candidates, Elected Officials and
Their Teams
Today, we're launching Facebook Protect to further secure the
accounts of elected officials, candidates, their staff and others
who may be particularly vulnerable to targeting by hackers and
foreign adversaries. As we've seen in past elections, they can be
targets of malicious activity. However, because campaigns are
generally run for a short period of time, we don't always know who
these campaign-affiliated people are, making it harder to help
protect them.
Beginning today, Page admins can enroll their organization's
Facebook and Instagram accounts in Facebook Protect and invite
members of their organization to participate in the program as
well. Participants will be required to turn on two-factor
authentication, and their accounts will be monitored for hacking,
such as login attempts from unusual locations or unverified
devices. And, if we discover an attack against one account, we can
review and protect other accounts affiliated with that same
organization that are enrolled in our program. Read more about
Facebook Protect and enroll here.
Increasing Transparency
Making Pages More Transparent
We want to make sure people are using Facebook authentically,
and that they understand who is speaking to them. Over the past
year, we've taken steps to ensure Pages are authentic and more
transparent by showing people the Page's primary country location
and whether the Page has merged with other Pages. This gives people
more context on the Page and makes it easier to understand who's
behind it.
Increasingly, we've seen people failing to disclose the
organization behind their Page as a way to make people think that a
Page is run independently. To address this, we're adding more
information about who is behind a Page, including a new
"Organizations That Manage This Page" tab that will feature the
Page's "Confirmed Page Owner," including the organization's legal
name and verified city, phone number or website.
Initially, this information will only appear on Pages with large
US audiences that have gone through Facebook's business
verification. In addition, Pages that have gone through the new
authorization process to run ads about social issues, elections or
politics in the US will also have this tab. And starting in
January, these advertisers will be required to show their Confirmed
Page Owner.
If we find a Page is concealing its ownership in order to
mislead people, we will require it to successfully complete the
verification process and show more information in order for the
Page to stay up.
Labeling State-Controlled Media
We want to help people better understand the sources of news
content they see on Facebook so they can make informed decisions
about what they're reading. Next month, we'll begin labeling media
outlets that are wholly or partially under the editorial control of
their government as state-controlled media. This label will be on
both their Page and in our Ad Library.
We will hold these Pages to a higher standard of transparency
because they combine the opinion-making influence of a media
organization with the strategic backing of a state.
We developed our own definition and standards for
state-controlled media organizations with input from more than 40
experts around the world specializing in media, governance, human
rights and development. Those consulted represent leading academic
institutions, nonprofits and international organizations in this
field, including Reporters Without Borders, Center for
International Media Assistance, European Journalism Center, Oxford
Internet Institute's Project on Computational Propaganda, Center
for Media, Data and Society (CMDS) at the Central European University, the Council of
Europe, UNESCO and others.
It's important to note that our policy draws an intentional
distinction between state-controlled media and public media, which
we define as any entity that is publicly financed, retains a public
service mission and can demonstrate its independent editorial
control. At this time, we're focusing our labeling efforts only on
state-controlled media.
We will update the list of state-controlled media on a rolling
basis beginning in November. And, in early 2020, we plan to expand
our labeling to specific posts and apply these labels on Instagram
as well. For any organization that believes we have applied the
label in error, there will be an appeals process.
Making it Easier to Understand Political Ads
In addition to making Pages more transparent, we're updating the
Ad Library, Ad Library Report and Ad Library API to help
journalists, lawmakers, researchers and others learn more about the
ads they see. This includes:
- A new US presidential candidate spend tracker, so that people
can see how much candidates have spent on ads
- Adding additional spend details at the state or regional level
to help people analyze advertiser and candidate efforts to reach
voters geographically
- Making it clear if an ad ran on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger
or Audience Network
- Adding useful API filters, providing programmatic access to
download ad creatives and a repository of frequently used API
scripts.
In addition to updates to the Ad Library API, in November, we
will begin testing a new database with researchers that will enable
them to quickly download the entire Ad Library, pull daily
snapshots and track day-to-day changes.
Visit our Help Center to learn more about the changes
to Pages and the Ad Library.
Reducing Misinformation
Preventing the Spread of Viral Misinformation
On Facebook and Instagram, we work to keep confirmed
misinformation from spreading. For example, we reduce its
distribution so fewer people see it — on Instagram, we remove
it from Explore and hashtags, and on Facebook, we reduce its
distribution in News Feed. On Instagram, we also make content from
accounts that repeatedly post misinformation harder to find by
filtering content from that account from Explore and hashtag pages
for example. And on Facebook, if Pages, domains or Groups
repeatedly share misinformation, we'll continue to reduce their
overall distribution and we'll place restrictions on the Page's
ability to advertise and monetize.
Over the next month, content across Facebook and Instagram that
has been rated false or partly false by a third-party fact-checker
will start to be more prominently labeled so that people can better
decide for themselves what to read, trust and share. The labels
below will be shown on top of false and partly false photos and
videos, including on top of Stories content on Instagram, and will
link out to the assessment from the fact-checker.
Much like we do on Facebook when people try to share known
misinformation, we're also introducing a new pop-up that will
appear when people attempt to share posts on Instagram that include
content that has been debunked by third-party fact-checkers.
In addition to clearer labels, we're also working to take faster
action to prevent misinformation from going viral, especially given
that quality reporting and fact-checking takes time. In many
countries, including in the US, if we have signals that a piece of
content is false, we temporarily reduce its distribution pending
review by a third-party fact-checker.
Fighting Voter Suppression and Intimidation
Attempts to interfere with or suppress voting undermine our core
values as a company, and we work proactively to remove this type of
harmful content. Ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, we extended
our voter suppression and intimidation policies to prohibit:
- Misrepresentation of the dates, locations, times and methods
for voting or voter registration (e.g. "Vote by text!");
- Misrepresentation of who can vote, qualifications for voting,
whether a vote will be counted and what information and/or
materials must be provided in order to vote (e.g. "If you voted in
the primary, your vote in the general election won't count.");
and
- Threats of violence relating to voting, voter registration or
the outcome of an election.
We remove this type of content regardless of who it's coming
from, and ahead of the midterm elections, our Elections Operations
Center removed more than 45,000 pieces of content that violated
these policies — more than 90% of which our systems detected before
anyone reported the content to us.
We also recognize that there are certain types of content, such
as hate speech, that are equally likely to suppress voting. That's
why our hate speech policies ban efforts to exclude people from
political participation on the basis of things like race, ethnicity
or religion (e.g., telling people not to vote for a candidate
because of the candidate's race, or indicating that people of a
certain religion should not be allowed to hold office).
In advance of the US 2020 elections, we're implementing
additional policies and expanding our technical capabilities on
Facebook and Instagram to protect the integrity of the election.
Following up on a commitment we made in the civil rights audit
report released in June, we have now implemented our policy banning
paid advertising that suggests voting is useless or meaningless, or
advises people not to vote.
In addition, our systems are now more effective at proactively
detecting and removing this harmful content. We use machine
learning to help us quickly identify potentially incorrect voting
information and remove it.
We are also continuing to expand and develop our partnerships to
provide expertise on trends in voter suppression and intimidation,
as well as early detection of violating content. This includes
working directly with secretaries of state and election directors
to address localized voter suppression that may only be occurring
in a single state or district. This work will be supported by our
Elections Operations Center during both the primary and general
elections.
Helping People Better Understand What They See Online
Part of our work to stop the spread of misinformation is helping
people spot it for themselves. That's why we partner with
organizations and experts in media literacy.
Today, we're announcing an initial investment of $2 million to support projects that empower
people to determine what to read and share — both on Facebook and
elsewhere.
These projects range from training programs to help ensure the
largest Instagram accounts have the resources they need to reduce
the spread of misinformation, to expanding a pilot program that
brings together senior citizens and high school students to learn
about online safety and media literacy, to public events in local
venues like bookstores, community centers and libraries in cities
across the country. We're also supporting a series of training
events focused on critical thinking among first-time voters.
In addition, we're including a new series of media literacy
lessons in our Digital Literacy Library. These lessons are drawn
from the Youth and Media team at the Berkman Klein Center for
Internet & Society at Harvard
University, which has made them available for free worldwide
under a Creative Commons license. The lessons, created for middle
and high school educators, are designed to be interactive and cover
topics ranging from assessing the quality of the information online
to more technical skills like reverse image search.
We'll continue to develop our media literacy efforts in the US
and we'll have more to share soon.
Media Contact: Jamil Walker jamilw@fb.com
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SOURCE Facebook