Facebook’s ‘war room’ to combat manipulation

In Facebook’s “War Room,” a nondescript space adorned with American and Brazilian flags, a team of 20 people monitors computer screens for signs of suspicious activity. The freshly launched unit at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters in California is the nerve center for the fight against misinformation and manipulation of the largest social network by foreign actors trying to influence elections in the United States and elsewhere.

Inside, the walls have clocks showing the time in various regions of the US and Brazil, maps and TV screens showing CNN, Fox News and Twitter, and other monitors showing graphs of Facebook activity in real time. Facebook, which has been blamed for doing too little to prevent misinformation efforts by Russia and others in the 2016 US election, now wants the world to know it is taking aggressive steps with initiatives like the war room.

“Our job is to detect ... anyone trying to manipulate the public debate,” said Nathaniel Gleicher, a former White House cybersecurity policy director for the National Security Council who is now heading Facebook’s cybersecurity policy. “We work to find and remove these actors.” Facebook has been racing to get measures in place and began operating this nerve center -- with a hastily taped “WAR ROOM” sign on the glass door -- for the first round of the presidential vote in Brazil on October 7.

It didn’t take long to find false information and rumors being spread which could have had an impact on voters in Brazil. “On election day, we saw a spike in voter suppression (messages) saying the election was delayed due to protests. That was not a true story,” said Samidh Chakrabarti, Facebook’s head of civic engagement. Chakrabarti said Facebook was able to remove these posts in a couple of hours before they went viral.