Facebook is well prepared to resist any disinformation campaigns surrounding the European Parliament election in May 2019, Joel Kaplan, the companys vice president for global public policy, told a parliamentary hearing in Brussels on Monday.
Despite the multilingual and fragmented nature of the election, Kaplan insisted Facebooks tools to handle electoral interference are more sophisticated than they were in the 2016 U.S. elections and arent fixed to deal with a single language or culture.
The tools to identify fake accounts or financial motivations “dont have to look at content” and can operate across many different languages, Kaplan insisted.
In response to MEPs questions, the executive mostly rehashed the companys existing commitments to remove fake accounts, combat foreign interference, be more transparent about ads and work to support civic engagement.
“We can deploy [these tools] in any number of countries and work with electoral commissions in small countries to get those out before elections,” Kaplan told MEPs from four different parliamentary committees.
Kaplan took part in the second of three public hearings on the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica data breach before European Parliament committees. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke to group leaders from the Parliament in May.
The next hearing is set for July 2.
