ISLAMABAD: Facebook has deployed technology tools and thousands of people as enhanced security measures since the company’s “major focus” this year is to guard the integrity of forthcoming elections in several countries on its platform, including Pakistan and India, said Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chairman and CEO.

“This is going to be a big year for elections ahead, with the US midterms and elections in India, Brazil, Mexico, Pakistan, Hungary and other countries. This is going to be a major focus for us,” he said.

We now have about 15,000 people working on security and content review and we’ll have more than 20,000 by the end of this year,” Zuckerberg told reporters during a conference call on Thursday.

Earlier this week, Zuckerberg said that Facebook took a major step by taking down Russia’s Internet Research Agency (IRA) pages that were apparently targeting the US.

“Since we became aware of their activity after the 2016 US elections, we’ve been working to root out the IRA and protect the integrity of elections around the world,” he said.

Zuckerberg pointed out that the “new AI tools were deployed” before the French presidential elections which “took down more than 30,000 fake accounts.

In the German election, Facebook developed a new playbook for working with the local election commission on sharing information on threats it received, he added.

“We have more work to do here and we’re going to continue working very hard to defend against them,” he said.

Zuckerberg points out three fields of activities that basically need to be countered during polls.

First, there are economic actors, who are basically spammers; the second is governments trying to interfere in elections, and the third is just polarization and sometimes lack of truthfulness in what you’ve described as the media, he said.