Facebook’s EU Elections Operation Centre in Dublin

A statement from Facebook about the upcoming EU Elections. 

Following the work of similar centres in the United States, Brazil and India, the centre in Dublin will oversee Facebook’s efforts to combat misinformation, foreign interference and coordinated inauthentic behaviour on its platforms in the lead-up to this month’s elections.

EU Elections

– There are approximately 40 separate teams in the operations centre, with specialisms in areas including threat intelligence, data science, software engineering, research, operations, legal, policy, communications, and others. Facebook staff work in rotating shifts to keep a constant watch for platform abuse.

– These teams are supported by an additional 500 people who work on election issues full-time at Facebook, and another 30,000 focussed on safety and security issues.

– The operations centre includes specialists covering all 28 EU countries, with expertise in each of the 24 official languages of the European Union. Facebook’s global operations team, which is based in Dublin, provides language support and country experts, to assist in navigating the nuances of local language and culture.

– In addition, Facebook has partnered with 21 fact-checking organisations covering 14 languages across the EU, including TheJournal.ie and FactCheckNI.

– Facebook carried out detailed scenario-planning in the lead up to these elections – with the expectation that the operations centre teams will be able to address the vast majority of issues that could arise, without delay.

– The teams working on these issues are continually monitoring both external and internal information sources, including:

– – News coverage from international and local channels.

– – CrowdTangle to follow trends in real time of what people are publicly posting and talking about on Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and Twitter. This will include things like hashtags that are trending. This will also allow us to track trends by certain locations or campaigns.

– – Internal channels and dashboards for anomalies on our platforms. Examples:

– – – if a group or page suddenly goes viral

– – – if there is a spike in reported spam or hate speech

– – – if activity differs markedly in week over week on trends for example changes in patterns of posting might alerts us to potential anomalies and threats.

Facebook election integrity efforts

Facebook has outlined its commitment to election integrity efforts, in the European Parliament elections and around the world:

– Q&A on Our Preparations for EU Elections (April 26)
– Protecting Elections in the EU (28 March)
– Protecting the European Parliament Elections (28 January)
– Protecting the EU Elections From Misinformation and Expanding Our Fact-Checking Program to New Languages (25 April)
– A Better Way to Learn About Ads on Facebook (28 March)

See other articles about Facebook by Irish Tech News here.