Chennai: With elections ongoing in Tamilnadu, West Bengal, Assam, Kerala and Puducherry, Facebook has announced measures that are being implemented to ‘support and protect’ the polls.
Based on lessons learnt from past elections in India and globally, steps are being taken to enhance civic engagement, combat hate speech, limit misinformation, and remove voter suppression, the social media giant said.
Facebook said it will also continue to closely partner with election authorities, including to set up a high priority channel to remove content that breaks its rules or is against local law after receiving valid legal orders.
“Facebook has invested significantly in proactive detection technology to help catch violating content more quickly. To decrease the risk of problematic content going viral in these states and potentially inciting violence ahead of or during the election, Facebook will significantly reduce the distribution of content that its proactive detection technology identifies as likely hate speech or violence and incitement,” it said.
This content will be removed if determined to violate Facebook’s policies, but its distribution will remain reduced until that determination is made.
Under its existing Community Standards, Facebook removes certain slurs that it determines to be hate speech. To complement that effort, Facebook may deploy technology to identify new words and phrases associated with hate speech, and either remove posts with that language or reduce their distribution.