Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook is enhancing its security features to ensure the integrity of elections in countries like India, a day after the Centre warned the social media giant of strong action against any attempt to influence the country's electoral process.
Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook is enhancing its security features to ensure the integrity of elections in countries like India, a day after the Centre warned the social media giant of strong action against any attempt to influence the country's electoral process.
The Centre's warning had come after reports said British firm Cambridge Analytica "harvested" data on 50 million Facebook users to help politicians, including Donald Trump in his presidential campaign, and Brexit campaign.
Zuckerberg, in an interview with The New York Times, referred to the artificial intelligence (AI) tools deployed by Facebook to detect fake accounts, trying to manipulate news and influence the elections.
"This is a massive focus for us to make sure we're dialed in for not only the 2018 elections in the US, but the Indian elections, the Brazilian elections, and a number of other elections that are going on this year that are really important," Zuckerberg said.
This is for the first time that Zuckerberg has publicly talked about Facebook being allegedly used for influencing polls.
IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad had said on Wednesday that Facebook knows his power as the government did not permit the firm free basics. "Let my stern warning be heard across the Atlantic, far away in California. Mr Mark Zuckerberg, you better note... if any data theft of Indians is done, this shall not be tolerated. We will summon you to India," he had said.
There are 200 million FB users in India, the biggest footprint in the world.
"The new AI tools we built after the 2016 elections found, I think, more than 30,000 fake accounts that we believe were linked to Russian sources who were trying to do the same kind of tactics they did in the US in the 2016 election. We were able to disable them and prevent that from happening on a large scale in France," Zuckerberg said.
"Last year in 2017 with the special election in Alabama, we deployed some new AI tools to identify fake accounts and false news, and we found a significant number of Macedonian accounts that were trying to spread false news, and were able to eliminate those," Zuckerberg said.
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