Facebook is preparing for possible unrest after polls close on the November 3 presidential elections, with its internal tools used for “at-risk” countries likely to be deployed for the US, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The measures include slowing the spread of viral content and lowering the bar for suppressing potentially inflammatory posts, WSJ quoted people familiar with the developments as saying.
These tools were used in the past for Sri Lanka and Myanmar and are part of a larger tool kit developed by Facebook to prepare for the US election, it said.
“We’ve spent years building for safer, more secure elections,” Facebook spokesman Andy Stone was quoted as saying. “We’ve applied lessons from previous elections, hired experts, and built new teams with experience across different areas to prepare for various scenarios.”
The tools will be deployed only in dire circumstances such as election-related violence.
The likely steps include tweaking the news feed to change what types of content users see, the report said.
The Kremlin said on Monday that Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s assessment of Russia as the biggest threat to US national security was wrong and encouraged hatred of Russia.
{{/usCountry}}The Kremlin said on Monday that Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s assessment of Russia as the biggest threat to US national security was wrong and encouraged hatred of Russia.
{{/usCountry}}“We absolutely do not agree,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on a conference call, when asked to comment on Biden’s assessment. “We can only regret that absolute hatred of the Russian Federation is spread in this way.”
On Sunday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said he saw nothing criminal in Hunter Biden’s past business ties with Ukraine or Russia, marking out his disagreement with one of Donald Trump’s attack lines in the presidential election. He was responding to comments made by Trump during televised debates. Trump has used the debates to make accusations that Biden and his son Hunter engaged in unethical practices in Ukraine.