A team of 20 employees are placed in a nondescript place provided by Facebook to monitor computer screens for signs of any kind of suspicious activity. The space provided is called as “War Room”.

The special dedicated unite was freshly launched at the headquarters of Facebook located in Menlo Park, California and is the nerve center for combating misinformation and manipulation of the largest ever social media network. The perpetrators are mainly foreign players attempting to influence elections in the United States or elsewhere.

When one gets inside the room, the walls are attached with clocks displaying various times from US and Brazil. There are also maps and TV screens displaying CNN, Twitter, Fox News and other monitors displaying graphs of Facebook activity in real time basis.

In the recent months, Facebook had to face the blame for doing almost nothing to prevent misinformation spread on the platform specially by Russia and others in the 2016 US election. And now the company wants the world to understand the initiatives and policies taken by it to aggressively combat those evil designs all through the war room.

“Our job is to detect … anyone trying to manipulate the public debate,” said Nathaniel Gleicher, a former White House cyber-security policy director for the National Security Council who is currently the chief of Facebook’s cyber-security policy.

“We work to find and remove these actors.”

Facebook is attempting to implement all the measures decided by the company by placing and operating the ‘War Room’. By doing so, it hopes to combat evil designs planning to manipulate the upcoming presidential vote in Brazil on October 7.

But the efforts bore some of its fruit after the team successfully found false information and rumours being spread through its platform, which could have eventually had an impact on voters in Brazil.

“On election day, we saw a spike in voter suppression (messages) saying the election was delayed due to protests. That was not a true story,” said Samidh Chakrabarti, Facebook’s head of civic engagement.

According to Chakrabarti, Facebook was successful in removing many of these posts within couple of hours before they became viral.

“It could have taken days.”

During the launching of the war room giving space for a small group of journalists which included AFP this week, a man sporting a grey porkpie continuously watched the screen where a Brazilian flag was attached.

He was talking nothing, but the mission tasked upon his shoulders was obvious and that was to watch for any kind of hints of interference with the second round of voting going to be held on October 28.

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