San Francisco:
Facebook has announced a civil rights task force that would help it fight political interference in the 2020 presidential campaign and census. The task force will have onboard civil rights expertise to ensure it is effective in addressing areas like content policy, fairness in
artificial intelligence, privacy and elections.
“We will work with voting rights experts to make sure key members of our election team are trained on trends in voter intimidation and suppression so they can remove this content from Facebook more effectively,” Facebook COO
Sheryl Sandberg said in a blog post on Sunday.
Facebook witnessed heavy political interference from nationstate actors during the 2016 US presidential election on its platform.
“With both the US Census and the US presidential elections, 2020 will be big year. An accurate census count is crucial to governments for functions like distributing federal funds and to businesses and researchers.
“That’s why we’re going to treat next year’s census like an election— with people, policies and technology in place to protect against census interference,” said Sandberg.