Under an American flag, 20 people piled up in a beige conference room are those of Facebook, and also the Internet's first line of defense for democracy. This is Facebook's election security war room. The screens display the influx of foreign political content and attempts to suppress voters as members of high-ranking teams from all divisions of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp coordinate quick responses. Hope is through face-to-face collaboration in real time in the war room, Facebook can accelerate decision-making to minimize how misinformation influences how users vote.
In this video, TechCrunch takes you inside the war room on Facebook Headquarters of Menlo Park. Filled with action under the glow of threat control panels, you see what should have existed two years ago. During the presidential elections in the United States, the Russian government trolls and the fake news media for profit polluted the social network with polarizing propaganda. Now Facebook hopes to avoid a repeat in the next partial exams of EE. UU., As well as elections around the world. And to win the hearts, minds and confidence of the public, it is more transparent about its strategy.
"It's not something you can scale to simply solve humans, and it's not something that can be solved with technology alone," says Nathaniel Gleicher, head of cybersecurity "I think artificial intelligence is a critical component of a solution and humans are a critical component of a solution." The two approaches are combined in the war room.
Who's in the war room and how they defend
Engineers – Facebook programmers develop control panels that control political content, hate speech, user reports about possible false news, voter suppression content and much more They build alarms that warn the team of anomalies and spikes in the data, which triggers an investigation by …
- Data Scientists : once a threat is detected and visualized In the threat dashboards, these team members investigate who is behind an attack and the network of accounts that run the disinformation campaign.
- Operations Specialists : Determine if the attacks violate Facebook's community standards and how. If a violation is confirmed, they delete the appropriate accounts and content where they appear on the network.
- Threat Intelligence Researchers and Researchers : These cybersecurity professionals are very experienced in deciphering the sophisticated tactics that Facebook uses. Powerful adversaries including state actors. They also help Facebook to run war games and simulations to practice defense against last minute attacks in the elections.
- Instagram and WhatsApp Leaders : Facebook acquisitions must also be protected, so representatives of those teams join the war room to coordinate monitoring and demolitions in the company's family of applications. Together with Facebook users, they distribute information about the protection of elections to the 20,000 Facebook security employees.
- Local experts : Facebook now begins to work to defend an election from 1.5 to 2 years ahead of time. To provide maximum context for decisions, local experts from countries with upcoming elections come together to bring awareness of cultural norms and idiosyncrasies.
- Policymakers – To keep Facebook's rules about what is allowed to date to prevent the latest electoral interference. Tactics, legal and policy team members come together to turn the answers into the process .
Beyond their fellow Facebook employees, the team works with external partners in the technology, security and government industry. Facebook regularly cooperates with other social networks to exchange information and synchronize deletions. Facebook has to get used to this. Following the intermediate terms, you will evaluate if you need to constantly operate a war room. But after he was surprised in 2016, Facebook accepts that he will never be able to close his eyes again.
The Facebook director of our global government policy and outreach team Katie concludes Harbath. "This is our new normality."