Inside Facebook's election war room - a global effort to fight "misinformation".

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“We know when it comes to an elections, every moment counts,” said Samidh Chakrabarti, head of civic engagement at Facebook, who oversees the war room. “So if there are late-breaking issues we see on the platform, we need to be able to detect and respond to them in real time, as quickly as possible.”

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Employees look for suspicious spikes in spam and hate speech, in some cases using custom software built for the purpose.

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If anyone finds a problem, they escalate it to a specialist, who can then route it to the appropriate decision-maker. Facebook has also given state attorneys general and other elected officials a way to reach the war room quickly to report voter suppression and other suspicious activity.

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On the day we visited, the room was decorated with a mix of American and Brazilian flags, in a nod to the next two elections that are being watched in the war room. It’s a fraught time: last week, Facebook removed 559 pages and 251 accounts in the United States for using fake identities and coordinating information campaigns.

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