NEW DELHI: With just four months left for India<\/a> to go for general elections, Facebook<\/a> is looking to “ramp up its integrity efforts” in the country. This will include “imminent appointment of key personnel, increased advertising transparency, and implementing its learnings from the recently concluded elections in Brazil, the United States (Congress and Senate midterms), Bangladesh, and India (state elections).

The company also revealed that it was yet to witness “anything in terms of coordinated behaviour (multiple actors trying to spread misinformation) in India”. But Facebook expects such activity to emerge closer to elections.

In an interaction with ET, Katie Harbath, Facebook’s global politics and government outreach director, said that the company was close to appointing an election integrity head, a position it was trying to fill for the last three months. She also said for Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg<\/a> and COO Sheryl Sandberg<\/a> Indian polls are “top priority” and “they remain very involved in Facebook’s election integrity plans”.

“We’re very close. But what I will say is that there is a lot of hiring we have done across the company, in a lot of different locations (for election integrity work). That we are still hiring people should not take away from the fact that we have been working on the Indian elections since October 2017, when we first started pulling together teams and started thinking about 2019 elections and state elections in between,” she said.

The social media company also wants to step up its enforcement of transparency for political advertisements, a move it started early December last year. “We have been exploring a variety of different options and best ways to execute that. Some of the things we are trying to work through, for instance, is — how do we balance people’s privacy (providing a name and can cause problems) versus the public’s right to know who is behind these (political) ads,” Harbath said.

\n \n \n \n \n