This post was originally published on this site
Deep in the bowels of Facebook‘s serpentine campus in Menlo Park, California, is a room about 25 feet square that may have a lot to do with how the world thinks about the company in the coming months. It looks like a Wall Street trading floor, with screens on every wall and every desk. And 20 hours a day—soon to be 24 hours a day—it’s jammed with about two dozen geeks, spooks, hackers, and lawyers trying to spot and quash the next bad thing to happen on the company’s networks.
It’s known appropriately as the War Room, and it was set up just a month ago—in advance of the Brazilian presidential election and US midterm elections—as perhaps Facebook’s most dramatic and visual step to ensure that the fraud and manipulation that was rampant on Facebook’s networks during the 2016 US presidential election don’t recur.
In years past Facebook would have worked hard to keep an effort like this under wraps for fear of letting competitors know what it was up to or of signaling an imperfection in one of Silicon Valley’s biggest success stories. But Facebook’s reputation has been damaged by the manipulation it did not detect in 2016, its arrogant response after the vote, and this year’s Cambridge Analytica scandal. So Wednesday morning it invited about two dozen journalists to take a look, to ask questions, and to hopefully tell the world that Facebook is at least trying to get things right this time.
Inside Facebook’s