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Facebook monitoring for signs of interference in Sask. election

This is the first time Saskatchewan will be reaping the benefits of Facebook's Canadian Election Integrity Initiative on a local level.

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Facebook is taking measures to protect Saskatchewan’s provincial election from outside interference and misinformation, which includes giving political parties and candidates access to a direct email line to a specific political support team.

In October 2017, Facebook Canada launched its Canadian Election Integrity Initiative with an eye to safeguarding the 2019 federal election from the foreign interference concerns that plagued the 2016 U.S. election.

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With Saskatchewan’s Oct. 26 election, this is the first time the province will be reaping the benefits of that initiative locally.

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Kevin Chan, head of public policy for Facebook Canada, told reporters in a teleconference on Thursday that the social media giant has been in touch with all of the province’s political parties and Elections Saskatchewan.

“We stand ready to co-ordinate with them if and as required and we’ve also made our emergency cyber hotline … available to all the political parties in Saskatchewan in the event that they need to have a direct pipe to us and to reach us quickly for any kind of challenges they’ve experienced,” Chan said.

Since its launch, the initiative has worked with political parties in six provincial elections across the country as well as the most recent federal election.

Although Chan said political parties and candidates have not often needed to use the email hotline, it has been used for issues like flagging an account impersonating a politician or more simple fixes like losing the password to an account after an administrator retired.

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“To my knowledge, we haven’t had any incomings through the cyber crisis email line to date (in Saskatchewan). But we do stand ready, literally,” Chan said.

Fake accounts are one of the driving forces behind foreign or domestic interference in elections and behind misinformation campaigns, said Chan. In 2020 alone to date, Facebook has disabled 3.2 billion fake accounts across its platform.

A lengthy approval process for political ads also helps prevent fake accounts from posing as political figures. Parties or candidates must verify their identity, provide their address and say who is paying for the ad. Then a confirmation code is mailed to the address given, which then has to be typed into their Facebook account before the ad can run.

Facebook has also created an “ad library” — at facebook.com/adlibrary — where anyone can search for ads that have run in the last seven years. This shows the details of who paid for the ad, approximately how much it cost, how many impressions it received and the demographic that was targeted.

When asked why Facebook does not just refuse to run any political ads, Chan said this is something Facebook has debated.

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“In the past, we’ve seen political ads online and on Facebook being abused and so very naturally you might want to know why don’t you just shut these things down?” he said, noting that Facebook does not make a profit off of political ads because of the intensive work that goes into approving and monitoring them.

“Campaigns, activists, political parties, groups that use Facebook to organize and mobilize and campaign, they do see value in these tools. And in fact, the biggest concern that we heard was that if we were to turn political ads off, it would actually hinder smaller parties and smaller groups from getting their voices heard.”

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lgiesbrecht@postmedia.com

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