Nick Clegg says Facebook to open another ‘war room’ to fight fake news

Facebook will soon open another election “war room” to help its fight against fake news ahead of  the 2019 European Parliament Elections.

The move was announced in a speech by the social network’s new policy chief and former UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, who said the war room would open this spring at Facebook’s Dublin office.

The announcement was Clegg’s first major public appearance since he joined the social network last fall. The former deputy PM was one of the company’s highest profile hires since it became embroiled in Cambridge Analytica and other data privacy scandals. 

Speaking in Brussels Monday, Clegg said the war room would help Facebook fend off fake news and prevent voter suppression ahead of the 2019 European Parliament Elections. The former politician also used the speech to defend the social network’s data collection practices, saying ““we must avoid legitimate questions about data-driven businesses evolving into an outright rejection of data sharing and innovation,” The Guardian reported.

The new Dublin war room is a significant expansion for the company, which launched its first war rooms last fall, ahead of the U.S. midterm elections and presidential elections in Brazil. The war room doesn’t represent a significant policy change for the company, but brings together a number of different teams within Facebook that work on issues related to elections. By having representatives from the company’s numerous teams that respond to misinformation on the platform, such as security, policy, and engineering, Facebook says it can react to potential election interference much more quickly than before. 

Though Facebook executives have praised the war room, comparing it to the company’s “shift to mobile” in 2012, critics have labeled it a PR stunt. And some questioned why the company’s inaugural war room at its Menlo Park headquarters was no longer in use just weeks after the U.S. midterms.