The war room is part of stepped-up security announced by Facebook that will be adding some 20,000 employees. The war room was activated just weeks ahead of the US vote, amid persistent fears of manipulation by Russia and other state entities, or efforts to polarize or inflame tensions. “There’s no substitute to face to face interactions,” he said. “Humans can adapt quickly to new threats,” Gleicher said of the latest effort.Ĭhakrabarti said the new center is an important part of coordinating activity - even for a company that has been built on remote communications among people in various parts of the world. The war room adds a human dimension to the artificial intelligence tools Facebook has already deployed to detect inauthentic or manipulative activity. With experts in computer science, cybersecurity and legal specialists, the center is operating during peak times for the US and Brazil at present, with plans to eventually work 24/7. The war room, which will ramp up activity for the November 6 midterm US elections, is the most concrete sign of Facebook’s efforts to weed out misinformation. He said nothing but his mission was obvious - watching for any hints of interference with the second round of voting in Brazil on October 28. “It could have taken days.” Humans and machinesĪt the unveiling of the war room for a small group of journalists including AFP this week, a man in a gray porkpie hat kept his eyes glued to his screen where a Brazilian flag was attached. That was not a true story,” said Samidh Chakrabarti, Facebook’s head of civic engagement.Ĭhakrabarti said Facebook was able to remove these posts in a couple of hours before they went viral. “On election day, we saw a spike in voter suppression (messages) saying the election was delayed due to protests. It didn’t take long to find false information and rumors being spread which could have had an impact on voters in Brazil. “We work to find and remove these actors.”įacebook has been racing to get measures in place and began operating this nerve center - with a hastily taped “WAR ROOM” sign on the glass door - for the first round of the presidential vote in Brazil on October 7. “Our job is to detect … anyone trying to manipulate the public debate,” said Nathaniel Gleicher, a former White House cybersecurity policy director for the National Security Council who is now heading Facebook’s cybersecurity policy.
Warroom tv tv#
Inside, the walls have clocks showing the time in various regions of the US and Brazil, maps and TV screens showing CNN, Fox News and Twitter, and other monitors showing graphs of Facebook activity in real time.įacebook, which has been blamed for doing too little to prevent misinformation efforts by Russia and others in the 2016 US election, now wants the world to know it is taking aggressive steps with initiatives like the war room. The freshly launched unit at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters in California is the nerve center for the fight against misinformation and manipulation of the largest social network by foreign actors trying to influence elections in the United States and elsewhere. In Facebook’s “War Room,” a nondescript space adorned with American and Brazilian flags, a team of 20 people monitors computer screens for signs of suspicious activity. Employees work in Facebook’s “War Room,” during a media demonstration on October 17, 2018, in Menlo Park, California.The war room, which will ramp up activity for the November 6 midterm US elections, is the most concrete sign of Facebook’s efforts to weed out misinformation.
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