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Canadian Government Teams With Facebook To Protect Election Integrity (vice.com)

An anonymous reader quotes Motherboard: There are nearly as many Canadians who use Facebook daily as there are people in this country who are registered to vote -- which is why the federal government is working with Facebook to protect its next federal election... Facebook is now facing perhaps its biggest test as it looks to curb foreign electoral interference and the rampant disinformation on its platform, both of which undermine the nature of democracy. Facebook Canada's election integrity project includes a partnership with a local digital news media literacy organization MediaSmarts, as well as a "cyberhygiene guide" that highlights particular vulnerabilities such as phishing and page-admin authentication. Facebook also has a crisis email line to help politicians and parties with hacking concerns... Kevin Chan, Facebook Canada's head of public policy, said the social media company is working on preventing bad actors from interfering with the democratic process. "At Facebook we take our responsibilities seriously," Chan said. "We don't want anyone to use our tools to undermine democracy."
At the launch of "the Canadian Election Integrity Initiative," Canada's Minister of Democratic Institutions argued that social media sites "must begin to view themselves as actors in shaping the democratic discourse."

The article points out Facebook "has promised to hire thousands of workers globally to help review flagged and suspicious content, as well as use machine learning to identify suspicious patterns of behavior on its platform."

5 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. "Protect Election Integerity" by BlueStrat · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Wow, that's not Orwellian at all.

    Strat

    --
    Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
    1. Re:"Protect Election Integerity" by Suki+I · · Score: 4, Insightful
  2. Kill Putin, Save Russia and World by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    Putin needs to die, quickly, and all these destabilizing actions by the failures of old-guard imperialism will end.

  3. Re:"Election Integrity" LOL by Suki+I · · Score: 5, Insightful

    By "election integrity" they mean making sure the correct candidate gets elected by votes ore stolen election. We can't have another donald trump or other populist candidate win. Facebook's censorship will really help them out!

    Exactly. And Facebook should never appear in the same sentence as integrity, unless modified with "lack of."

  4. I'd rather have my content modified... by rbrander · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ...by an open process run by a government than a closed process run by a private corporation the size of a government with no responsibility to the public whatsoever.

    Because of the open process, this is going to timidly filter out a little of the worst of the worst, and that's about it.