Will uphold integrity of Indian polls: Mark Zuckerberg

New Delhi: Following days of silence, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg admitted on Wednesday that the social network had “made mistakes” that led to millions of users having their data exploited by a political consultancy firm, and added that the tech giant is enhancing its security features to ensure the integrity of upcoming key elections, including in India and Brazil, on its platform.

He said the tech giant is now using artificial intelligence (AI) to ensure that no organisation or entity misuses Facebook to influence elections.

“We have a responsibility to do this, not only for the 2018 midterms in the US, which are going to be a huge deal this year and that’s just a huge focus for us, but there’s a big election in India this year, there’s a big election in Brazil, there are big elections around the world, and you can bet that we are really committed to doing everything that we need to do to make sure that the integrity of those elections on Facebook is secured,” Zuckerberg wrote in a post on Facebook.
A data scandal erupted after a whistleblower revealed that Cambridge Analytica, a data firm with ties to Trump’s presidential campaign, accessed personal data of 50 million Facebook users without their knowledge, and might have kept that data even after Facebook told the company to delete it.

Union law and information technology minister Ravi Shankar Prasad had on Tuesday warned Facebook against any attempt to influence India’s electoral process through “undesirable means”.