Inside Facebook’s Election ‘War Room’

Although it is not much to look at now, as of the week of Sept 24 the "War Room" will be Facebook’s headquarters for safeguarding elections. More than 300 people across the company are working on the initiative, but the War Room will house a smaller team of about 20 people focused on rooting out disinformation, monitoring false news and deleting fake accounts that may be trying to influence voters before coming elections in the United States, Brazil and other countries. “We see this as probably the biggest companywide reorientation since our shift from desktops to mobile phones,” said Samidh Chakrabarti, who leads Facebook’s elections and civic engagement team. The company, he added, “has mobilized to make this happen.”

Chakrabarti, who joined Facebook about four years ago from Google, said one of the new tools the company is introducing is custom-designed software that helps track information flowing across the social network in real time. These dashboards resemble a set of line and bar graphs with statistics that provide a view into how activity on the platform is changing. They allow employees to zero in on, say, a specific false news story in wide circulation or a spike in automated accounts being created in a particular geographic area. “The best outcome for us is that nothing happens in the War Room,” he said. “Everything else we are doing is defenses we are putting down to stop this in the first place.”