KUALA LUMPUR – Facebook owner Meta is in full gear to face the 15th general election (GE15) by sharing its work to help protect the integrity of the upcoming polls, as well as its ongoing work to combat misinformation, hate speech and investments in digital literacy in Malaysia.
Roy Tan, head of politics and government outreach, APAC at Meta said that their goal was to make it harder to interfere with elections on their platforms, and easier for people to make their voices heard in the political process.
“We are committed to tackling harmful content on our platform, which we know may intensify during elections, from misinformation, misrepresentation and interference, to hate speech.
We have dedicated teams working on every upcoming election around the world, as it is incredibly important to us as a company that we get this right ahead of Malaysia’s 15th general election.”
Meta has a dedicated team responsible for every election in the world.
“Very important for us as a responsible company to ensure our effort synergises with our initiative in the upcoming GE15,” Tan said in a media brief.
Noudhy Valdryno, head of public policy, Malaysia at Meta said the company’s initiative is aimed at protecting the integrity of the Malaysian election, which is built on our ongoing efforts and investments to increase ads transparency, improve our enforcement on violating content and support digital literacy in Malaysia.
“We are committed to continuing this work in the lead up to, during and after voting day,” said Valdryno.
The following are among Meta’s initiatives in facing GE15.
Supporting an informed electorate
Meta shares best practices with election authorities and stakeholders, including various government agencies, media organisations, election watchdogs, non-governmental organisations and political candidates on how to use their apps effectively and responsibly.
Additionally, it also supports news publishers in creating responsible and quality content. Meta will also launch a vote reminder that directs people to official information from the Election Commission of Malaysia.
Fighting misinformation
In recent years, Meta said it has increased efforts to combat misinformation by investing in teams, technology and partnerships to ensure the safety of people using Meta’s platforms.
This includes removing content on Facebook and Instagram that discourages voting or interferes with voting, such as incorrect information about the election date or candidates’ numbers.
Meta also works with independent fact-checking organisations to verify the veracity of reported posts that don’t violate its Community Standards. In Malaysia, Meta works with Agence France-Presse.
When fact-checkers rate a piece of content as false, altered or partly false, its reach and distribution are reduced on Facebook.
On Instagram, such content gets filtered out of Explore and is featured less prominently in feed and stories. People who still see this content in their feeds will see it with a label and a link directing them to more information from the fact-checker.
On WhatsApp, since messages are protected with end-to-end encryption, meaning no one but the sender and the recipient can read them, it has introduced measures to reduce message virality.
There is a limit on forwarding messages on WhatsApp: if a message has already been forwarded, users can further forward it to just five chats at once, including a maximum of one group chat, making WhatsApp one of the few technology companies to intentionally constrain sharing.
This reduces the number of forwarded messages on WhatsApp by over 25%. Messages with five or more forwards – labelled with double arrows – can be resent to just one chat, which has led to a 70% global reduction in the number of frequently forwarded messages.
Supporting digital literacy
Meta launched We Think Digital (WTD), a digital literacy and citizenship program, to help equip people with skills to think critically about the information they find online, spot false news, and be responsible digital citizens.
Through Meta’s partnership with Teach for Malaysia (TFM), the program has trained over 2,640 students nationwide since 2020, from over 200 schools nationwide including completing the recently introduced WTD modules on how to identify and report online scams.
This year, TFM also held a nationwide student competition, which challenged students to put their digital literacy knowledge into creating awareness campaigns related to online safety, and reached over 800 students.
Meta also expanded its WTD partnership with University Malaya to equip about 300 student ambassadors for digital citizenship.
Increasing political ads transparency
Meta said that they aim to let people know the entities behind the ads they see across their apps so that they can make informed decisions on polling day.
Advertisers in Malaysia are required to complete an authorization process and include “Paid for by” disclaimers on these ads.
Ads about elections or politics that run in Malaysia will also appear in the Ads Library so that people can see what ads are running, who saw them and how much was spent. This fully searchable archive stores ads for seven years. – The Vibes, October 21, 2022
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