Has Progress Been Made in Containing Disinformation?

[Judi Lynn]

MARCH 28, 2019
BY DAVID A. WEMER

The spread of online disinformation during the 2018 election campaigns in Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil demonstrated to social media companies that they need to “make sure that we are not solving just the problems that we saw in the US in 2016, but that we are really thinking steps ahead,” according to Katie Harbath, public policy director of global elections at Facebook.

The three high-profile elections in Latin America made up “one of our very first big test cases” for new measures meant to limit the spread of false information on Facebook, Harbath said at the Atlantic Council in Washington on March 28. But while Facebook has had some success in limiting harmful activity on its platform, Harbath explained “we have to have different solutions for all of our different platforms.”

Harbath was joined at the Atlantic Council by WhatsApp Director and Head of Communications Carl Woog for an event looking back at 2018’s elections in Latin America. While Facebook is used throughout the region, WhatsApp use is far more ubiquitous and presented unique problems for counter-disinformation efforts.

“Encryption is a headline feature of what we do,” Woog explained, “which means that we can’t see the messages that people send.” The widespread use of WhatsApp during all three electoral contests last year presents an issue for “a digital version of a private space that is much more like a living room than it is a town square,” Woog said.

More:
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/has-progress-been-made-in-containing-disinformation

[msongs]

1. nope the biggest spreader of disinformatio is twitter n its still operating nt