Meta Established an ‘Election Operations Center’ for Türkiye

Turkey has entered a new presidential election process. While the person who will assume the 5-year Presidency will be elected with the elections to be held on May 14, election security continues to be on Turkey’s agenda.

While many third parties continue to explain that they will help with measures for election security, an important statement came from Meta today. parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsAppannounced that it has established a special center for the security of elections in Turkey.

Meta set up center for election security:

Meta, in the statement he shared, “We are investing in people, partnerships and technology to reduce the spread of misinformation and remove harmful content from our apps to help keep Turkey’s elections on May 14 safe.” he stated. In this context, “Türkiye Elections Operations Center” announced that it was activated.

What will be the task of the Türkiye Elections Operations Center?

In the statement shared by the company, it was shared that the center will undertake tasks such as identifying potential threats in real time and responding faster. Ads, viral messages on WhatsApp and morewill be the responsibility of this centre.

Meta’s full Election Operations Center statement:

“Removing Harmful Content to Keep People Safe

We want people to be able to talk openly about the things they care about in our apps and be safe doing so. Our Community Standards publicly state what content is and isn’t allowed on Facebook and Instagram, and covers many areas of choice. These include policies of harassment and incitement to violence, as well as elaborate hate speech policies that prohibit attacks against people on issues such as ethnicity or religion. We remove content that violates these rules as soon as we detect it.

As election day approaches, we will activate the Turkey Election Operations Center, which focuses on detecting potential threats in real time and taking action quickly. This large-scale initiative of Meta will bring together engineers, lawyers, researchers and analysts working in different departments of our company.

Fighting False Information and False News

In certain circumstances, we completely remove false information from Facebook and Instagram that may contribute to potential violence or physical harm, or that is intended to discourage voting. This includes false reports about voting dates, places, times and methods.

We focus on slowing the spread and directing people to information from authoritative sources so that fewer people see all other types of false information. To do this, we work with over 90 independent third-party fact-checking organizations, including Sağlik Payı and Teyit from Turkey.

When the verification bodies we work with classify content as untrue, we significantly reduce the display of the content to reduce the likelihood that people will see it, warn people who share or have previously shared the content, and add warning tags to the content that lead to the verification body’s article that the information is false. When content is classified as “false”, “partially unfounded” or “modified”, we add warning labels to that content and reduce the display of it to make it less likely for people to see it.

We’ve made it easy for verification bodies to find and categorize election-related content in Turkey, as we recognize that it’s especially important to act quickly in breaking news events. We use keyword detection to gather election-related content in one place so that truth organizations can find it more easily.

At the same time, on WhatsApp, when people receive a message that seems suspicious or inaccurate, we encourage them to double-check this information with the verification bodies Truth and Confirmation to confirm the accuracy of the content.

Also, “How Can You Fight False Information?” to help our users detect and take action against false news online. We launched the campaign. As part of this campaign, we’ve partnered with local radio stations to advertise how false information is detected and what to do.

We value digital literacy education, and accordingly, we have launched programs that focus on identifying false information and aiming to improve digital literacy in Turkey. In March and April 2023, we also collaborated with academic, media and non-profit organizations, including Bilgi University, MediaWise, and the Habitat Association, to provide adults with misinformation and election literacy education.

Viral Messages on WhatsApp

Last year, we explained that any message sent once can only be forwarded to one group at a time. We rolled out the same feature for high-delivery messages in 2020 and saw the number of messages sent on WhatsApp decrease by more than 70 percent.

People can also control who can add them to group chats and block or report unknown people, giving them even more control over their privacy.

Political Ads and Transparency

Advertisers who want to run ads about social issues, elections or politics on our apps must go through a verification process to prove who they are and what country they live in. In line with our transparency principles, tags showing who the advertiser is are added to the posts.

We’ve also added new controls so people can choose to see fewer ads. Users don’t see tagged ads when they use these controls.

All political and election-based ads are added to our Ads Library for seven years, so everyone can know which ads are running, information about targeting and how much was spent on them.

Combating Election Interference

We have formed specialized teams to prevent interference in elections. Through these teams we have created, we have focused on some Pages, Groups and Accounts, namely coordinated abuse (CIB), which are trying to interfere with public discussion using sophisticated networks.

Since 2017, we have removed over 200 networks worldwide due to coordinated abuses (CIB); When we detect such activity on our platforms, we take action, especially when it is related to elections. We will continue to monitor and remove the CIB networks we identify and share their details publicly.”