How Meta Is Preparing for the EU’s 2024 Parliament Elections

Meta has been preparing for the EU Parliament elections for a long time. Last year, we activated a dedicated team to develop a tailored approach to help preserve the integrity of these elections on our platforms.

While each election is unique, this work drew on key lessons we have learned from more than 200 elections around the world since 2016, as well as the regulatory framework set out under the Digital Services Act and our commitments in the EU Code of Practice on Disinformation. These lessons help us focus our teams, technologies, and investments so they will have the greatest impact.

Since 2016, we’ve invested more than $20 billion into safety and security and quadrupled the size of our global team working in this area to around 40,000 people. This includes 15,000 content reviewers who review content across Facebook, Instagram and Threads in more than 70 languages — including all 24 official EU languages. 

Over the last eight years, we’ve rolled out industry-leading transparency tools for ads about social issues, elections or politics, developed comprehensive policies to prevent election interference and voter fraud, and built the largest third party fact-checking programme of any social media platform to help combat the spread of misinformation. More recently, we have committed to taking a responsible approach to new technologies like GenAI. We’ll be drawing on all of these resources in the run up to the election.

[OCS: Any censorship of individuals is tantamount to election interference. And as long as corporate entities are considered artificial individuals with similar rights, then free speech should apply to both--and both should be held equally accountable for wrongdoing.]

As the election approaches, we’ll also activate an EU-specific Elections Operations Center, bringing together experts from across the company from our intelligence, data science, engineering, research, operations, content policy and legal teams to identify potential threats and put specific mitigations in place across our apps and technologies in real time.

[OCS: The preponderance of employees and experts employed by Meta appear to be progressive communist democrats who suffer from “groupthink” and coersive supervisory or peer pressure. Many “experts” come from government entities, and, in particular, intelligence and law enforcement agencies, to which they still maintain allegiance and association.]

Here are three key areas our teams will be focusing on:

Combating Misinformation

We remove the most serious kinds of misinformation from Facebook, Instagram and Threads, such as content that could contribute to imminent violence or physical harm, or that is intended to suppress voting.

[OCS: Remember the Hunter Biden Laptop story widely suppressed by fact-checkers (without supporting facts) as Russian disinformation. However, the laptop was real and contained genuine information that could have changed the outcome of the 2020 election?]

For content that doesn’t violate these particular policies, we work with independent fact-checking organisations — 26 partners across the EU covering 22 languages  — who review and rate content. We are currently expanding the programme in Europe with 3 new partners in Bulgaria, France, and Slovakia.

[OCS: This is the antithesis of free and open speech. While these organizations may be “independent from Meta,” who is to say they are not selected from a biased cohort that “knows” what is expected of Meta-funded entities? Or, can these organizations actually discern truth from fiction or honestly stated opinions?]

When these fact checkers debunk content, we attach warning labels to the content and reduce its distribution in Feed so people are less likely to see it. Between July and December 2023, for example, over 68 million pieces of content viewed in the EU on Facebook and Instagram had fact checking labels. When a fact-checked label is placed on a post, 95% of people don’t click through to view it.

[OCS: This is censorship based on “facts” likely derived from a “consensus” of biased results—where dissenting opinions have already been suppressed.]

Ahead of the elections period, we will make it easier for all our fact-checking partners across the EU to find and rate content related to the elections because we recognize that speed is especially important during breaking news events. We’ll use keyword detection to group related content in one place, making it easy for fact-checkers to find. Our fact checking partners are also being onboarded to our new research tool, Meta Content Library, that has a powerful search capability to support them in their work.

[OCS: Most breaking news stories get significant details wrong as they try to capture an audience. Likewise, many false stories are never corrected after the fact and remain active in the search function, adversely affecting later reporting.]

We don’t allow ads that contain debunked content. We also don’t allow ads targeting the EU that discourage people from voting in the election; call into question the legitimacy of the election; contain premature claims of election victory; and call into question the legitimacy of the methods and processes of election, as well as its outcome. Our ads review process has several layers of analysis and detection, both before and after an ad goes live, which you can read more about here.

[OCS: This is bullshit meant to protect the regime, which is presupposed to tell the truth. Unconstitutional election changes rigged the 2020 election, including the direct interference of Zuckerbucks, the suppression of reporting on candidate corruption, actual election fraud, etc. This has not been adequately explored but labeled as a debunked conspiracy theory.]

<Source>