Facebook has taken a lot of criticism for the spread of misinformation or fake news on its platform during the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. The company has taken steps since then to ensure that something like that does not happen again. It launched a “war room” before the U.S. midterm elections to prevent the spread of fake news. A new report claims that the social network has now shut it down.
Bloomberg reports that Facebook has shut down the war room and that it won’t be reopened for future elections. When Facebook showed it off to the media it got a lot of attention and some speculated that perhaps it was a publicity stunt on the company’s part.
Facebook said at that time that the war room would bring together people from across the company’s divisions in one room to improve threat detection and prevention ahead of the midterm elections. The war room was reportedly deployed for the presidential election in Brazil last month.
Even though the war room has now been shut down, Facebook told the scribe that it’s going to use different strategies for future elections and it has formed a “strategic response team” under vice president of operations Justin Osofsky to deal with time-sensitive threats.
Filed in . Read more about Facebook.