Meta should clarify in its Transparency Center that, in addition to the Crisis Policy Protocol, the company runs other protocols in its attempt to prevent and address potential risk of harm arising in electoral contexts or other high-risk events. In addition to naming and describing those protocols, the company should also outline their objective, what the points of contact between these different protocols are, and how they differ from each other. The Board will consider this recommendation implemented when Meta publishes the information in its Transparency Center.
Our commitment: We will share more information about our various election integrity processes, protocols, and systems and how they all interrelate here. We will also explore opportunities to highlight this information elsewhere on the Transparency Center.
Considerations: Meta has regional teams across the company who are identifying and mitigating potential risks around the world throughout the year. Depending on the risk level of a given election, those teams will develop and implement dedicated mitigation plans months or even years prior to an election. We publicly describe our tools and systems for adapting to situations of heightened risk on our
Transparency Center. This includes continuously monitoring impacts to our platforms and the people on them, in terms of both expression and safety, and resulting adjustments to our measures in response to any spikes or changes in the signals we’re tracking.
As part of Meta’s elections preparation and response work, a number of teams, including Human Rights, Civil Rights, Policy, Product, engineering and operations teams, identify election-related content trends and incorporate them into our content risk mitigation strategies. Prior to the election, our risk assessment processes gather information from many sources to identify potentially harmful trends. These sources include public reports, recommendations from our trusted partners, ongoing observations of content trends, and assessments from our intelligence teams. The results, among other factors, help to inform a number of product and policy mitigations, including designating places with upcoming high-risk elections Temporary High-Risk Locations (“THRL”), a designation used to identify markets in need of additional monitoring and support.
As described in our response to the
case regarding a post calling for violence in Ethiopia (recommendation #2), Meta stands up Integrity Product Operations Centers (“IPOCs”), as needed, to bring together subject matter experts from across the company to respond in real time to potential problems and trends. For some planned events, such as elections in high-risk locations, Meta schedules IPOCs in advance. During a given election, we also monitor sources similar to those we used to conduct our risk assessment. We use, among other things, data analysis tools, inputs from trusted partners, and monitoring of traditional media. We also monitor trends in user reports and content flagged by our classifiers.
These IPOCs often work in conjunction with our Crisis Policy Protocol (“CPP”) to help us assess how to address content risks. The THRL designation process and CPP designation review process are separate, though they both draw on some of the same signals for heightened risk of violence or offline harm. While we may consider designating a THRL during a crisis, it is not contingent or dependent on a CPP designation. We hope this response provides useful public clarity on the various protocols Meta deploys to prevent and address potential harms that may arise in electoral or other high-risk contexts. We will continue to explore additional opportunities to share public updates about this work and will provide updates in future Quarterly Updates.