Facebook tackles misinformation ahead of India’s elections with AI

Ahead of India’s general elections, Facebook has tightened its policy strategies tackling the spread of misinformation during the electoral campaign. The current strategy includes political ad transparency policies which allow for more clarity on the funds behind the advertisement and on the profile of the publisher. Moreover, Facebook will create regional operation centres composed by engineers, operations specialists and data scientists in order to speed up the reaction against fake news when information has been flagged as such. Finally, Facebook also uses Artificial Intelligence to block fake accounts or profiles that violate the platform’s guidelines. Thanks to machine learning, about 1 million accounts per day are blocked around the world and in the past week, 700 pages and groups were removed in India for content violation.