Protecting the Integrity of Myanmar’s Elections on Facebook

Ensuring the integrity of Myanmar’s election on Facebook is a priority for our company and is something that we’ve been working on for many months.

The policies, products, and programs that we’ve introduced are aimed at ensuring that those using Facebook during the election campaign feel empowered, safe, and are informed by reliable sources. We’ve also introduced unprecedented levels of transparency to political advertising. Photo Source https://bit.ly/3lFkxbc

These are some of the key focus areas of our work ahead of November.

• A dedicated election team
• Introduced political ads transparency
• Preventing interference
• Directing people to authoritative sources of voting information
• Reducing and removing misinformation
• Combating hate speech

Today, we would like to share new updates about how we are striving to protect the integrity of the election on our platform.

We’ve introduced policies that are time-bound and specific to Myanmar in order to help protect the integrity of the election on our platform.

From now until 22 November, we are:

• Removing verifiable misinformation and unverifiable rumors with the potential to suppress the vote or damage the integrity of the electoral process.
• Removing attacks against concepts associated with religion and ethnicity (e.g. attacks against Islam).
• Removing attacks with references to immigrant groups denied citizenship rights (e.g. the Rohingya) when described as “invaders” or “illegals,” or proxies for these terms.
• Extending full protections under our Bullying & Harassment policy to vulnerable public figures, including journalists, activists, and human rights defenders Photo Source https://bit.ly/3iSWnIF

In August, we shared our new hate speech data for Myanmar. In the second quarter of 2020, we took action against 280,000 pieces of content in Myanmar for violations of our Community

Standards prohibiting hate speech, of which we detected 97.8% proactively before it was reported to us. This is up significantly from Q1 2020, when we took action against 51,000 pieces of content for hate speech violations, detecting 83% proactively.

We’re constantly working to find and stop coordinated campaigns that seek to manipulate public debate across our apps. In 2019 alone, we took down over 50 networks worldwide for engaging in coordinated inauthentic behavior (CIB), including ahead of major democratic elections. Since 2018, we’ve identified and disrupted seven networks engaging in Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior in Myanmar.