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Facebook is setting up a election response team ahead of Lok Sabha elections

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Paawan Sunam
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Facebook has cumulated an election response team that'll work closely with the Election Commission of India; many of Facebook's tools and products, too, have been revamped for the same.

The steps have been taken ahead of the general elections to decrease the spread of fake news and false information. The company has also partnered with media organisations to flag false stories in Hindi, English and a few other regional languages.

“The work that we are doing here is so important that we actually staffed a product team dedicated to the Indian elections over a year ago in the US. This is extremely unusual for a product team to have any part of their team dedicated to a specific country, let alone a specific event in a country. But we thought that was really important”, Samidh Chakrabarti, Global Director of product management for civic integrity, Facebook told ET in an interview.

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“Our new election centre in Singapore will primarily support Indian elections so we will have engineers, data scientists, product managers, operations specialists and policy folks all based there within the same time zone to handle things quickly", he adds.

Facebook also plans to roll out Candidate Connect, to aid people learn more about the candidates contesting for Lok Sabha.

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