- Facebook’s parent company, Meta has rolled out its strategy to combat fake news ahead of the 2023 election
- The tech giant said it will continue to work closely with election authorities and local partners
Ahead of the general elections in 2023, Meta, the corporation that owns WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram, disclosed on Wednesday its strategies for battling fake news and hate speech.
This was included in the list along with initiatives to stop the dissemination of false information and increase the transparency of political advertising.
It emphasized that the work would continue before, during, and after voting and built on Meta’s expertise and lessons learned from assisting elections in Sub-Saharan Africa and the rest of the world.
Adaora Ikenze, Meta’s Head of Public Policy for Anglophone West Africa, made this known during a media roundtable event in Lagos organized to share the company’s election integrity efforts.
She said that Meta would be taking aggressive steps to fight the spread of misinformation on its services in Nigeria.
“We know we have an important responsibility when it comes to helping keep people safe during the elections. Using lessons from the past including input from experts and policymakers across the national spectrum, we’ve made substantial investments in people and technology to reduce misinformation, remove harmful content on our platforms, fight voter interference and promote civic engagement during the elections.
“We continue to work closely with election authorities and local partners in Nigeria to ensure we’re preparing for the specific challenges in Nigeria and taking appropriate steps to stay ahead of emerging threats.
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“Some of the steps we are taking to prepare for the Nigerian elections include: A dedicated cross-functional team spread across the world as well as locally focused on the Nigerian elections. This includes a number of people from Nigeria and people who have spent significant amounts of time in the country, as we recognize that local understanding is critical.
“The team also includes individuals with global expertise in misinformation, hate speech, elections, and disinformation. These teams are working hard to prevent any abuse of our services before, during, and after Nigeria’s 2023 general elections.
“Locally, we also have staff who reside in Nigeria and work in the public policy, & public policy programs and communications.”
Ikenze listed others to include keeping people safe, noting that since 2016, “we have quadrupled the size of the global teams working on safety and security to about 40,000 people, and have invested more than $16 billion in teams and technology in this area.”
“This also includes over 15,000 content reviewers, who are located across the globe, in every major timezone. Collectively, these reviewers are able to review content in more than 70 languages- including Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa.
“On WhatsApp bulk or automated messaging is a violation of our terms of service. If we find instances of people misusing the service, we remove those accounts. We continue to constrain forwarding and earlier in 2022 we announced that any message that has been forwarded once, will now only be able to be forwarded to one group at a time, rather than five, which was the previous limit.
“When we introduced the same feature for highly forwarded messages, it reduced the number of these messages sent on WhatsApp by over 70 percent.
“We also label ‘forwarded’ and ‘highly forwarded’ messages to highlight when something has been shared multiple times. We’ve introduced forward limits to Messenger too, so messages can only be forwarded to five people or groups at a time.”
