Facebook's AI is deleting one million accounts every day as the Indian election heats up

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Facebook's AI is deleting one million accounts every day as the Indian election heats up
Facebook is using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to remove over one million accounts a dayFacebook

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  • Facebook India’s managing direction, Ajit Mohan, just published a blog outlining Facebook’s 18 month journey to prepare for India’s general election.
  • In the blog he claims that using artificial intelligence and machine learning, Facebook is able to remove nearly one million accounts a day.
  • In the past, Facebook’s content moderation guidelines has been called into question for being biased.
As the beginning of India’s general election inches closer, Facebook and its associated platforms — WhatsApp and Instagram — are doubling down in their efforts to keep from creating controversy.


The managing director and vice president of Facebook’s India operations, Ajit Mohan, just published a blog post claiming that using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), the social networking site has been able to block or remove nearly one million accounts a day.

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As Facebook continues to play a larger role in civic discussions and debate, we are committed to working hard to prevent abuse on our services, especially during elections.

Excerpt from blog post by Ajit Mohan, Managing Director and Vice President, India

He claims that using AI and ML to monitor content helps the company “identify abusive or violating content, and remove it in bulk.”

They also help us, at a large scale, identify abusive or violating content, quickly locate it across the platform and remove it in bulk. This dramatically reduces its ability to spread. We continue to expand on this initiative, adding 24 new languages — including 16 for India — to our automatic translation system.

Excerpt from blog post by Ajit Mohan, Managing Director and Vice President, India

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There are human fact checkers also in play. The partnership with seven accredited fact-checking organisation, Facebook is able to cover content in eight different languages — English, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam and Gujarati — that it believes to be the most commonly used online.

While the mass removal of accounts is impressive it should be kept in mind that Facebook has over 300 million users and its content moderation practices have been called into question in the past for being biased.

Just last week, Facebook removed nearly 700 pages from Facebook and most of them were associated to Congress, one of India's political parties for exhibiting ‘inauthentic behavior’.

See also:
After Twitter, Facebook will face questions from the Indian Parliament

The Indian election might be Facebook's last chance to prove that it can fight fake news and political bias

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