How Facebook is trying to safeguard elections

Inside a windowless conference room at Facebook’s sprawling headquarters, a few dozen employees sit in what’s become the heart of the company’s wide-ranging efforts to fight election interference.

It’s called the war room — Facebook’s hub for its election interference first responders. The engineers and data scientists and policy officials whose job it is to spot everything from foreign interference to attempts at voter suppression. 

The war room, which officially opened in September, is emblematic of just how much has changed at Facebook in the wake of the 2016 election — and how much is still at stake. After failing to spot Russia-backed influence campaigns and stem the tide of fake news in 2016, Facebook use is falling as distrust for the company grows.

Mark Zuckerberg, who once dismissed election-related concerns as a “crazy idea” (he later apologized), has spent hours testifying in front of Congress and EU officials. And, nearly two year after the election, many of Facebook’s new policies governing ads and misinformation are still only just beginning to take shape.

Against that backdrop, Facebook’s war room is the company’s best opportunity yet to prove not only that it has learned from its past mistakes but that it knows how to fix them.

“In all honesty, I haven’t seen a cross-companywide effort like this since we did the shift to mobile in 2012,” says Katie Harbath, Facebook’s director of global politics and government outreach. 

Inside the war room

The war room itself is a single, conference room at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters. It’s staffed nearly 24 hours a day (closer to election day it will be a round-the-clock operation), with representatives from 20 different teams across the company. 

“The primary thing we’ve learned is actually just how effective it is having people across functions in the same room together,” says Samidh Chakrabarti, who directs elections and civic engagement initiatives at Facebook. 

In some ways, the war room feels like the least that Facebook can do. If election interference touches dozens of different teams, it seems obvious that members of those teams should be able to communicate quickly and without obstacles. The fact that it’s taken nearly two years to make that happen, then, says more about how dysfunctional things were in the run-up to the 2016 election than how effective the company is at fighting influence operations today.

But Chakrabarti and other executives are quick to point out just how big a difference it can make to have everyone in the same physical space.

Inside the war room, clusters of desks fill the center of the room, while the walls are lined with large displays. There are also maps of the United States and Brazil, flags, clocks, and a timer ticking down to the next election (in this case, it’s Brazil’s run-off elections at the end of October).

War room staffers constantly monitor election-related activity on Facebook, as well as viral trends on other platforms like Reddit and Twitter (using CrowdTangle, an analytics tool owned by Facebook). 

One display has a live video feed of a similar war room in a Brazil Facebook office so the two groups can instantly connect at moment’s notice.

Also on the walls: Facebook’s signature motivational posters, emblazoned with platitudes like, “beliefs don’t make us better but our behavior will,” and “nothing on Facebook is somebody else’s problem.” 

Same policies, new organization

Some of the work that happens in the war room isn’t, itself, new. Facebook has long had teams in place to root out fake accounts and fight spam, for example. Other aspects are more closely related to its recent election efforts. The company’s engineering team created software that can track the spread of fake news stories and political content originating outside the United States. 

If these systems detect “anomalies,” like sudden spikes in reports of voter suppression or activity that appears to be spammy or “coordinated,” then Facebook’s war room data scientists are instantly alerted. Once they’re alerted, they can investigate and route issues to the operations team who are able to take action. (Facebook has previously removed accounts linked to influence campaigns originating from Russia and Iran).  

In this way, it’s not so much Facebook enforcing new policies as it is reorganizing its disparate teams and tools to be able to detect and respond to problems much more nimbly. Issues that once could have taken days or even weeks to resolve can now be addressed in a matter of hours.

“When it comes to an election, every moment counts. If there are late-breaking issues, we need to be able to detect them and respond to them as quickly as possible,” says Chakrabarti.

The company will face questions about whether its war room efforts go far enough, and if its policies are even equipped to handle issues this complex in the first place. 

WhatsApp, which uses encrypted messaging, has proved to be particularly challenging for Facebook. In Brazil, where WhatsApp is the most dominant messaging app, fake news has been spreading at an alarming rate. And Facebook isn’t able to track fake news that spreads through WhatsApp messages the way it can in News Feeds. 

Still, the war room and everything that happens inside it is a necessary step. Everyone is finally in the same room and ready to act. And, unlike in 2016, they are actually looking for problems before they blow up. Now Facebook just has to hope those safeguards will be enough.