Lok Sabha Elections 2019: Facebook claims to be removing 1 million abusive and spam accounts per day

Social media giant Facebook has today said that it is removing or blocking out around one million accounts per day keeping in mind that the first phase of Lok Sabha polls is just days away. The social media giant will be doing with the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) tools.

Speaking about it in a blog post, Facebook’s Managing Director and Vice President for India said, “We are absolutely committed to maintaining the integrity of the elections in India and will continue to work with local organisations, government groups and experts to make that happen.”

The company claims that it has been working for 18 months to ensure that Indian elections are free from interference, whether foreign or domestic.

Mohan further added, “This work is done across dozens of teams, both in India and around the globe, and began more than 18 months ago with detailed planning and risk assessment across our platforms. Building on lessons we’ve learned over the past two years, this week we will activate new regional operations centres, focused on election integrity, in Singapore and Dublin.”

We should mention that these teams include engineers, operation specialists and data scientists and they will be working closely with the company’s Menlo Park, California headquarters and experts based in Delhi.

As we mentioned earlier, the social media platform has said that it will be using AI and Machine Learning to identify abusive content located on its platform quickly. Furthermore, the company will be removing it all in bulk.

Mohan added, “We continue to expand on this initiative, adding 24 new languages – including 16 for India – to our automatic translation system.”

Facebook claims to have removed nearly 700 Pages, Groups and accounts in the country because they violated its policies with “coordinated inauthentic behaviour” and spam.

Before this, the company launched two election-related tools in India – Candidate Connect and Share You Voted.

With Candidate Connect, the social media platform will help its users to learn more about the candidates who are contesting the Lok Sabha elections from their respective constituencies. On the other hand, ‘Share you Voted’ will let people share the fact that they have voted.

In addition to this, the feature will also collect posts and photos from people who have voted to put it together in a collage at the top of peoples’ Facebook Friend’s News Feeds. With this, people will be able to celebrate the fact that they voted. Other than this, the feature it will encourage others on the social networking website to vote.