Turkey has begun a new presidential election process. While the person who will take on the 5-year presidency will be elected with the elections to be held on May 14, election security is still on Turkey’s agenda.

While many third parties continue to explain that they will help with election security measures, an important statement came from Meta today. parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsAppannounced that it has established a special center for the security of elections in Turkey.

Meta Established Election Security Center:

Meta, in the statement he shared, “We are investing in people, partnerships and technology to stop the spread of misinformation and remove harmful content from our apps to keep Turkey’s elections on May 14 safe.he claimed. In this context, “Election Operations Center in Türkiyeannounced that it was activated.

What will be the task of the Türkiye Elections Operations Center?

The statement shared by the company shared that the center will perform tasks such as identifying potential threats in real time and responding more quickly. Ads, viral messages on WhatsApp and morefalls under the responsibility of this centre.

Meta’s full statement from the Election Operations Center:

“Remove malicious content to keep people safe

We want people to be able to talk openly about the things they care about in our apps and to do so safely. Our Community Guidelines publicly state what content is and isn’t allowed on Facebook and Instagram, covering many areas of choice. These include policies of harassment and incitement to violence, as well as extensive hate speech policies that prohibit attacks against people on issues such as ethnicity or religion. We remove content that violates these rules as soon as we detect it.

As Election Day approaches, we will be activating the Turkey Election Operations Center, which focuses on detecting potential threats in real time and taking prompt action. This large-scale Meta initiative will bring together engineers, lawyers, researchers and analysts from different departments of our company.

Combating false information and fake news

In certain circumstances, we completely remove false information from Facebook and Instagram that may contribute to potential violence or bodily harm, or that is intended to discourage voting. This includes false reports about voting dates, places, times and methods.

We focus on slowing the spread and directing people to information from authoritative sources so that fewer people see all other types of false information. To do this, we collaborate with more than 90 independent third-party fact-checking organizations, including Sağlik Payı and Teyit from Turkey.

When the verification authorities we work with classify content as false, we significantly reduce the display of the content to reduce the likelihood of people seeing it, warn people who share or have shared the content, and add warning labels to the content which leads to the article of the inspection body that the information is incorrect. When content is classified as ‘false’, ‘partially unfounded’ or ‘altered’, we add warning labels to that content and reduce its display so that people are less likely to see it.

We’ve made it easy for verifiers to find and categorize election-related content in Turkey, recognizing that it’s especially important to act quickly on major news events. We use keyword detection to collect election-related content in one place to make it easier for truth organizations to find.

At the same time, when people on WhatsApp receive a message that seems suspicious or inaccurate, we encourage them to double-check that information with the Truth and Confirmation authorities to confirm the accuracy of the content.

Also “How can you combat false information?” to help our users detect and take action on inaccurate online news. We launched the campaign. As part of this campaign, we are working with local radio stations to advertise how false information is detected and what to do.

We are committed to digital literacy education, which is why we have launched programs that focus on identifying false information and aiming to improve digital literacy in Turkey. In March and April 2023, we also partnered with academic, media, and non-profit organizations, including Bilgi University, MediaWise, and the Habitat Association, to provide adult misinformation and election literacy education.

Viral messages on WhatsApp

Last year we explained that any message sent once can only be forwarded to one group at a time. In 2020, we rolled out the same feature for high-delivery messages and saw the number of messages sent on WhatsApp drop by more than 70 percent.

People can also control who can add them to group chats and block or report unknown people, giving them even more control over their privacy.

Political advertising and transparency

Advertisers who want to run ads about social issues, elections or politics in our apps must go through a verification process to prove who they are and which country they live in. In accordance with our transparency principles, tags are added to the posts that show who the advertiser is.

We’ve also added new controls so people can choose to see fewer ads. Users will not see tagged ads when using these controls.

All political and election-based ads are added to our Ad Library for seven years, so everyone knows which ads are showing, information about targeting, and how much was spent on them.

Combating election interference

We have formed specialized teams to prevent interference in elections. Thanks to these teams that we have created, we have targeted some pages, groups and accounts, namely Coordinated Abuse (CIB), which are trying to disrupt public discussion using sophisticated networks.

Since 2017, we have removed more than 200 networks worldwide for coordinated abuses (CIB); When we detect such activity on our platforms, we take action, especially if it is related to elections. We will continue to monitor and remove the CIB networks that we identify and share their data publicly.”