Facebook said the EU elections "undoubtedly present" one of the most complex elections Facebook has faced since it will take place in 28 countries across which speak 24 official languages. The company has launched an elections operations center in Dublin for coordination and response. Fact-checking efforts False information is detected using machine learning and is flagged to human reviewers who then check the false content and rate its accuracy, false posts marked so by fact-checkers are downmarked and their distribution is reduced Added five new fact-checkers: Ellinika Hoaxes in Greece, FactCheckNI in Northern Ireland, Faktograf in Croatia, Observador in Portugal and Patikrinta 15min in Lithuania – all IFCN-certified fact-checkers have all become Facebook's partners for fact-checking ahead of the European Parliament elections in May. Fact-checkers in 14 European languages: Croatian, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. FactCheckEU: Facebook's fact-checkers are also working to fact-check election related content. Platform changes to WhatsApp When asked about how Facebook will deal with WhatsApp during the EU elections, Gleicher said its "really important" to understand that WhatsApp is actually a fundamentally different kind of platform and service than Facebook. "It is fundamentally a private messaging application and therefore the vectors for abuse are actually quite different than one might see at Facebook," he said. He explained that WhatsApp has created computation techniques to crack down on spammy behaviour: Banning millions of fake accounts each month Global limit on forwards (to five) to constrain virality of platform…
