Facebook to set up high priority channel to remove harmful content during assembly polls
The platform is taking steps to enhance civic engagement, combat hate speech, limit misinformation, and remove voter suppression
Social media giant Facebook has listed measures that it is implementing to support and protect the ongoing polls across Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Assam, Kerala, and Puducherry. The platform is taking steps to enhance civic engagement, combat hate speech, limit misinformation, and remove voter suppression.
"We also continue to closely partner with election authorities, including to set up a high priority channel to remove content that breaks our rules or is against local law after receiving valid legal orders," Facebook said in a blog post.
In 2019, led by the industry body IAMAI, Facebook had set up a high-priority channel with ECI for Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, to receive content-related escalations. The Voluntary Code is applicable for this election as well.
On combating hate speech, Facebook said that the platform has a detailed policy against hate speech and it removes violating content as soon as we become aware of it. "To do this, we’ve invested significantly in proactive detection technology to help us catch violating content more quickly."
To decrease the risk of problematic content going viral in these states and potentially inciting violence ahead of or during the election, Facebook will significantly reduce the distribution of content that our proactive detection technology identifies as likely hate speech or violence and incitement. "This content will be removed if determined to violate our policies, but its distribution will remain reduced until that determination is made."
Under its existing Community Standards, Facebook removes certain slurs that we determine to be hate speech. "To complement that effort, we may deploy technology to identify new words and phrases associated with hate speech, and either remove posts with that language or reduce their distribution."
In addition to the standard practice of removing accounts that repeatedly violate the Community Standards, Facebook will also temporarily reduce the distribution of content from accounts that have recently and repeatedly violated our policies.
In order to tackle misinformation, Facebook works with third-party fact-checkers around the world, including eight partners in India who are certified by the International Fact-Checking Network, to provide people with additional context about the content they’re seeing on Facebook.
"Over the last year, we enhanced our coverage in the primary languages of the states going to vote. In addition to English, these eight partners fact-check in 11 Indian languages including Bengali, Tamil, Malayalam, and Assamese. When a fact-checker rates a story as false, we label the content and show it lower in News Feed, significantly reducing its distribution. This stops its spread and reduces the number of people who see it," Facebook said.
