Meta vows to combat abuses as Indian states head for polls

FACEBOOK’S parent Meta on Thursday (10) outlined its resolve to curb hate speech, harmful content and misinformation on its platforms as five Indian states go to polls.

The social media giant said it will activate its Elections Operations Centre to watch out for potential abuses that could emerge across its platforms.

Meta, in a blog, said it has been preparing for the elections in India and has a “comprehensive strategy” in place to keep people safe and encourage civic engagement.

The move assumes significance as big social media firms have drawn flak in the past over hate speech, misinformation and fake news circulating on their platforms.

India’s government had notified rules last year to make digital intermediaries more accountable and responsible for content hosted on their platforms.

Information technology minister Ashwini Vaishnaw has recently said social media needs to be made more accountable and stricter rules could be brought in, if there is political consensus on the matter.

Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Manipur and Goa, which began on Thursday (10), will be held till March 7 in seven phases, with the counting of votes slated for March 10.

Meta underlined its commitment to improving transparency of political and social advertising.

It said it is launching the security megaphone to remind users to protect their accounts against online threats by activating two-factor authentication.

This will be available in three Indian languages, including Hindi.

"We'll be activating our Elections Operations Centre so we can monitor and respond to potential abuses that we see emerging related to these elections in real-time," Meta said.

Facebook's parent company recently changed its name to Meta. Apps under Meta include Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram.

Meta said it has a “comprehensive strategy” in place for these elections, which includes detecting and removing hate speech and content that incites violence. It includes reducing the spread of misinformation, making political advertising more transparent and partnering with election authorities to remove content that violates local law.

Meta acknowledged it is aware of how hate speech on its platforms can lead to offline harm.

The backdrop of elections makes it even more critical for the platform to detect potential hate speech and prevent it from spreading, it pointed out.

"This is an area that we've prioritised and will continue working to address comprehensively for these elections to help keep people safe," it pledged.

Meta said it has invested more than $13 billion (£9.54 bn) in teams and technology.

"This has allowed us to triple the size of the global team working on safety and security to over 40,000 including 15,000 plus dedicated content reviewers across 70 languages," it said.

For India, Meta has reviewers in 20 languages.

Under the existing Community Standards, the platform removes certain slurs that it determines to be hate speech.

"We are also updating our policies regularly to include additional risk areas. To complement that effort, we may deploy technology to identify new words and phrases associated with hate speech, and either remove posts with that language or reduce their distribution," it said.

Content that violates policies against hate speech are removed, it said, adding that even where it does not violate policies but can still lead to offline harm if it becomes widespread, the content is demoted that so fewer people see it.

Claiming it has made significant progress on its efforts, Meta said the prevalence of hate speech on the platforms is now down to just 0.03 per cent, although "there is always more work to be done".

Meta will also be offering election day reminders to give voters accurate information and encourage them to share the information with friends on Facebook.

As per data cited by the government last year, India had 530 million WhatsApp users, 448m YouTube users, 410m Facebook subscribers and 210m Instagram users, while 17.5m account holders were on microblogging platform Twitter.

(PTI)