Zuckerberg vows to enhance Facebook`s security features ahead of Indian polls
Washington, March 22: Facebook founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg has stated that the app's security features would be fortified prior to the polls in India. In a damage control mode, Zuckerberg announced a slew of measures aimed to secure the platform further.
“I feel a lot better about the systems now. At the same time, I think Russia and other governments are going to get more sophisticated in what they do, too. So we need to make sure that we up our game.”
Zuckerberg referred to the artificial intelligence (AI) tools deployed by Facebook to detect fake accounts trying to manipulate news and influence the elections. Such a tool was deployed for the first time in the French elections in 2017.
"The new AI tools we built after the 2016 elections found, I think, more than 30,000 fake accounts that we believe were linked to Russian sources who were trying to do the same kind of tactics they did in the US in the 2016 election. We were able to disable them and prevent that from happening on a large scale in France,” he said.
Earlier, Facebook Chief has apologised for a major breach of trust with two billion users of Facebook and vowed to take steps to protect user data, as the social media giant was rocked by a data breach scandal.
In his first public comments on the uproar over harvesting of data of 50 million users by a British firm linked to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, the Facebook CEO admitted of making mistakes and said he was happy to answer questions about the scandal before US Congress.
“This was a major breach of trust and I’m really sorry that this happened. Our responsibility now is to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” he said.
Yesterday, Information Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad cited media reports about the Congress' plan to use the firm's services for next year's Lok Sabha elections and to boost its President Rahul Gandhi's profile.
Prasad said, the firm has been accused of using sleaze and fake news to influence elections and asked if the Congress too plans to walk the same path. He warned Facebook of stringent legal action against any misuse of data of Indians on its platform.
The data scandal erupted after a whistleblower revealed that Cambridge Analytica, a data firm with ties to Trump’s 2016 campaign, accessed personal data from 50 million Facebook users without their knowledge, and might have kept that data even after Facebook told the company to delete it.
Cambridge Analytica (CA) had created psychological profiles on 50 million Facebook users via a personality prediction app, created by a researcher named Aleksandr Kogan.