Mark Zuckerberg has said Facebook is enhancing its security features to ensure the integrity of upcoming key elections in countries like India on its platform, as the social media giant faced flak over a major data breach scandal by a British firm linked to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
Zuckerberg, in an interview with The New York Times, referred to the artificial intelligence (AI) tools deployed by Facebook to detect fake accounts trying to manipulate news and influence the elections.
“The new A.I. Tools we built after the 2016 elections found, I think, more than 30,000 fake accounts that we believe were linked to Russian sources who were trying to do the same kind of tactics they did in the US in the 2016 election. We were able to disable them and prevent that from happening on a large scale in France,” he said.
“I feel a lot better about the systems now. At the same time, I think Russia and other governments are going to get more sophisticated in what they do, too. So we need to make sure that we up our game,” he said.
“This is a massive focus for us to make sure we’re dialed in for not only the 2018 elections in the US, but the Indian elections, the Brazilian elections, and a number of other elections that are going on this year that are really important,” Zuckerberg said.
Responding to a question, he said there is a lot of hard work that the Facebook needs to do to make it harder for countries like Russia to do election interference, to make it so that trolls and other folks can’t spread fake news.
“But we can get in front of this, and we have a responsibility to do this not only for the 2018 midterms in the US, which are going to be a huge deal this year, and that’s just a huge focus of us. But there’s a big election in India this year.
“There’s a big election in Brazil. There are big elections around the world, and you can bet that we are really committed to doing everything that we need to, to make sure that the integrity of those elections on Facebook is secured,” Zuckerberg said. PTI