Facebook launches civil rights task force ahead of 2020 US polls

Facebook has announced a civil rights task force that wouldhelp the social networking giant fight political interference in the 2020presidential campaign and census.

The task force will have onboard civil rights expertise toensure it is effective in addressing areas like content policy, fairness inartificial intelligence, privacy, and elections.

   

“We will work with voting rights experts to make surekey members of our election team are trained on trends in voter intimidationand suppression so they can remove this content from Facebook moreeffectively,” Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer at Facebook, saidin a blog post on Sunday.

Facebook witnessed heavy political interference fromnation-state actors during the 2016 US presidential election on its platform.

“With both the US Census and the US presidentialelections, 2020 will be big year. An accurate census count is crucial togovernments for functions like distributing federal funds and to businesses andresearchers.

“That’s why we’re going to treat next year’s censuslike an election — with people, policies and technology in place to protectagainst census interference,” said Sandberg.

The announcement came in the wake of a leading civil rightsexpert Laura Murphy releasing her second interim report in a multi-year auditof Facebook.

Murphy began leading an audit more than a year ago withsupport from the noted civil rights law firm Relman, Dane and Colfax. She spoketo more than 90 civil rights organizations and people from Facebook’s policy,product and enforcement teams.

“We’re also introducing civil rights training for allsenior leaders on the task force and key employees who work in the early stagesof developing relevant products and policies,” informed Sandberg.

Facbook said it now bans praise, support and representationof white nationalism and white separatism.

“The report recommends we go further to include contentthat supports white nationalist ideology even if the terms ‘white nationalism’and ‘white separatism’ aren’t explicitly used. We’re addressing this byidentifying hate slogans and symbols connected to white nationalism and whiteseparatism to better enforce our policy,” Sandberg announced.

In March this year, Facebook announced settlement agreementswith leading civil rights organizations to change how US housing, employmentand credit ads are run on Facebook.

“As a result of the settlement, we’re rolling out updatesso anyone who wants to run US housing, employment and credit ads will no longerbe allowed to target by age, gender or zip code and will have a much smallerset of targeting categories overall,” the Facebook COO added.

To protect elections, said Sandberg, the company has a teamacross product, engineering, data science, policy, legal and operationsdedicated full time to these efforts.

“We expect to finalize a new policy and its enforcementbefore the 2019 gubernatorial elections. This is a direct response to the typesof ads we saw on Facebook in 2016,” she added.

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