Facebook has partnered with Atlantic Council, to tackle Election meddling

Facebook recently became an unwilling favored platform for meddling in the US presidential elections. This comes in line with Russian miscreants who reportedly seeded fake ads to favor and support Donald Trump. Following this, Mark Zuckerberg had promised that the integrity of elections will be preserved. Zuckerburg made this announcement in his keynote address at the F8 2018. He also announced a number of plans to make the ads more transparent and also introduce a number of verification protocols for the ads related to politics.

Following this, Facebook has partnered up with the international affairs think tank, Atlantic Council, to dodge online disinformation campaigns and also prevent social media platforms from further being misused to affect the elections results.

As a result of the partnership, the experts from Atlantic Council Digital Forensic Research Lab will work with the Facebook's security, policy, and products team. The team will further identify threats including fake accounts and targeted ad campaigns which are spreading wrong information in order to affect the results of elections.

In an official blog post Facebook mentioned that "This will help increase the number of "eyes and ears" we have working to spot potential abuse on our service - enabling us to more effectively identify gaps in our systems, preempt obstacles, and ensure that Facebook plays a positive role during elections all around the world".

It is also being reported that Facebook will make use of Atlantic's Council's Digital Research Unit Monitoring during events like elections and sensitive social campaign in its effort to curb meddling in elections.

Facebook will also focus on a particular geographical area at a time. This will help it monitor the suspicious activities like foreign interference and also the spread of fake news and information. Facebook has also claimed that the latest step taken by the tech giant is a part of a broad initiative that looks for and removes bad actors from its platform and further prevents the abuse of its social media tools on a global scale.

Facebook had also previously disclosed that it will have a team of approximately 20,000 people by the end of 2018. The team will review content for added security. Also, Facebook is planning to announce a portal that will contain all the political ads, that includes details such as financing, target audience for a transparent infrastructure.