Inside Facebook’s plan to protect the U.S. midterm elections

You can boil Facebook’s election plan down into three main challenges:

• It wants to find and delete “fake” or “inauthentic” accounts.
• It wants to find and diminish the spread of so-called fake news.
• It wants to make it harder for outsiders to buy ads that promote candidates or important election issues.

Facebook’s top priority is finding and deleting “fake accounts” — either automated bots, or Pages and profiles operated by a real person pretending to be someone else — which are usually responsible for Facebook’s other major problems, like disinformation campaigns and misleading ads. “By far, the most important thing is going after fake accounts,” COO Sheryl Sandberg told a roomful of journalists back in June. “If you look at the things that happened in the [Russian] IRA ads on our platform in 2016, all of it was done though fake accounts.” One other new approach Facebook will take in 2018: The company plans to set up an actual, physical war room in its headquarters around election time to monitor activity on the service in the days and weeks leading up to the midterms. The company has had digital war rooms in the past, but hasn’t had a legitimate physical war room for a US election.