inside facebook’s election ‘war room’ - whiteboard wall

Menlo Park, California—
Sandwiched between building 20 and building 21 in the center of Facebook campus, about 25-foot-by-35-
The Foott conference room is under construction.
Thick blue wire hanging on the ceiling ready to connect to the window
There are 16 computer monitors of the size on the table.
On a wall, half
CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and other major networks will broadcast more than a dozen TVs.
A small note with an orange print on the glass door says what is being built: "War Room.
"Although not much is seen now, this space will be Facebook's headquarters for maintaining elections starting next week.
More than 300 people across the company are participating in the plan, but the war room will accommodate a team of about 20 people, focusing on eliminating false information, before elections in the United States, Brazil and other countries, monitor false news and delete false accounts that may attempt to affect voters.
"We think this could be the biggest corporate-wide readjustment since we switched from desktop to mobile," said Samidh Chakrabarti, head of the Facebook election and citizen engagement team.
He added that the company "has mobilized to achieve this goal.
"The abuse of Facebook by foreign forces is rampant.
In July and August, the company detailed efforts by Iranians and Russians to mislead social network users through split ads and posts that were previously undisclosed.
Now, with only seven weeks before the US midterm elections, Facebook is in full swing.
To convince the world that it is ready to deal with any new attempt to intervene.
The company is under tremendous pressure to prevent another foreign manipulation on social networks during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has vowed to address these issues. He said this month that Facebook was "better prepared" to deal with potential disruption.
But he admits that Facebook is engaged in an "arms race" with people who are trying to manipulate the platform ".
The company has taken steps to defend spammers, hackers and foreign agents
It includes hiring thousands of people to help ease content and starting to create a file to classify all political ads
But half of the war room
The status of completion shows how new and rushed many efforts are.
Priscilla Morichi, director of strategic threat development at cyber security company Recorded Future, said foreign agents have developed their online influence campaign to bypass measures set by Facebook ahead of the mid-term elections.
"If you look at the changes in foreign influence business over the past two years, their focus is no longer on spreading fake news," Ms. Li said. Moriuchi said.
"This is to increase the story that has already been told outside to the ultra-partisan audience.
"From my point of view, companies like Facebook and Twitter are now having a hard time finding them," she added . ".
"Facebook invited two New York Times reporters into the war room before the opening of next week to discuss the work of the election team and some of the tools it has developed to prevent interference.
The company has limited the scope of what The Times can see and publish because of concerns about giving too much information to opponents who may be looking for loopholes.
The company says the war room is an action to mimic the use of political campaigns, which are usually set up in the last few weeks before the election day.
Greg Mara, product manager working at Facebook's press conference, said on a conference call with reporters on Wednesday that the war room is a "proactive" way to build the system to respond
One of the tools the company is launching is custom software that helps track information that flows through social networks in real time.
Joined Facebook's Chakrabarti from Google about four years ago.
These dashboards are similar to a set of lines and bar charts, and the statistics provide a view of how activity changes on the platform.
They allow employees to concentrate, such as specific fake news reports that are widely circulated, or surge in automated accounts created in specific geographic areas.
The dashboard was tested for the first time before the special U. S. Senate elections in Alabama in December.
Sir, without specifying the dashboard
Zuckerberg said Facebook found political intervention more quickly in the election.
Since then, Facebook has tested and redesigned the software in multiple global elections.
This month, before Brazil's presidential election, the company will launch the latest version of the dashboard.
Said Chakrabarti.
Facebook created the so-called electoral and civic engagement team in 2007, working with the government and the movement to study how to make the most of social networks.
For a long time, the team had only a few dozen people in Silicon Valley;
It was expanded to include members of offices other than the United States in 2013.
After Facebook revealed that agents associated with the Kremlin manipulated social networks to spread inflammatory information to American voters in the 2016 election, the company began to increase the team's ranks.
The group was also reorganized to focus more on the security of the elections.
Since then, the team has grown rapidly to its current size, and the rest of the company has joined the team as well, and their work involves stopping certain aspects of electoral intervention.
Facebook says every department of it
Instagram and WhatsApp included-
I was told that election security is a top priority when designing products. Mr.
Chakrabarti holds several monthly meetings with Facebook's executives, engineers and product managers.
Meetings often include Mr.
Chief operating officer Zuckerberg and Cheryl Sandberg
Facebook decided this year to create a war room so that a core team of engineers, data scientists and executives could sit in the same space before the mid-term elections.
They chose an empty meeting room in the corridor connecting building 20 and building 21, a central point on Facebook campus and easily accessible to employees.
Construction began a few months ago, and the whiteboard wall and the room with a cluster of long tables will be open for operation on Monday.
It has been modified with cables and Internet boosters and new lines have been installed for monitors and other devices.
What happens in the war room will be the "last line of defense" for Facebook engineers to quickly discover unforeseen problems on and near Election Day in different countries ".
Said Chakrabarti.
Many of the company's other measures are designed to stop long before false information and other problems arise in the war room.
Once the problem arrives in the war room, the dashboard will be set to discover and track unusual activities, while data scientists and security experts will take a closer look. Mr.
Chakrabarti said the team is particularly alert to posts that show "real"
The world hurts "and plans to delete posts trying to deny voters rights by providing incorrect voting data or spreading pranks such as encouraging people to vote via text messages.
"The best result for us is that nothing happens in the war room," he said . ".
"Everything else we are doing is to stop this, and we have to put down our defenses first.