Facebook ‘delighted’ by war room response to fight fake news during Brazil election

As polls closed in Brazil on October 7, Facebook Inc. data scientists, engineers and policy experts gathered in a new space in the company’s Menlo Park, California, headquarters called the War Room. As they monitored trends on the company’s sites – like articles that were going viral and spikes in political-ad spending – they noticed a suspicious surge in user reports of hate speech.

The data scientists in the room told the policy experts that the malicious posts were targeting people in a certain area of Brazil, the poorer Northeast – the only region carried by the leftist presidential candidate. The policy folks determined that what the posts were saying was against Facebook’s rules on inciting violence. And an operations representative made sure that all of that content was removed.

The company, the world’s largest social network, says that by having different experts in this one room, representing their larger teams and coordinating the response together, they were able to address in two hours what otherwise might have taken several days – time that’s too valuable to waste during a critical election.

“We were all delighted to see how efficient we were able to be, from point of detection to point of action,’’ Samidh Chakrabarti, Facebook’s head of civic engagement, said Wednesday in a meeting with reporters.

Delight is not a sentiment that people in Brazil necessarily share. Despite Facebook’s stronger and more organised coordination of its effort to improve election-related content, Latin America’s largest country was still overrun with misinformation, much of it distributed via Facebook services. False information that was thwarted on Facebook’s main site by the company’s network of fact-checkers was still able to thrive on its WhatsApp messaging app, which is encrypted and virtually impossible to monitor.