CA urges Facebook to step up fight against misinformation
Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus today asked Meta to take steps to tackle misinformation and fake news being spread through Facebook in Bangladesh.
The chief adviser made the call when he held talks with Sir Nick Clegg, the head of global affairs at Meta, on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum annual meeting in the Swiss city of Davos, Chief Adviser's Deputy Press Secretary Abul Kalam Azad Majumder told BSS.
Yunus said oligarchs and politicians linked to the toppled dictatorship of Sheikh Hasina siphoned off tens of billions of dollars from Bangladesh during her 15 years of rule.
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"These people are now spending their fortune to spread lies and misinformation about Bangladesh," Yunus told Clegg, who is also a former deputy prime minister of England.
Sir Nick Clegg said Facebook would continue to do fact-checking and digital verification in Bangladesh as it is an important country, with its population the world's eighth largest.
Meta's decision to stop fact-checking in the United States would not be applicable for Bangladesh and countries in Europe, he said.
He said Facebook would likely scale up its digital verification service in Bangladesh and would explore ways to do fact checking by users --similar to the operation of Wikipedia.
During the half-an-hour-long meeting, Sir Nick also offered Meta's expertise in drafting a new cyber security law.
"We have a lot of experience here," he said.
The Meta global affairs chief said Llama, the company's recently launched open-sourced large language model AI, could help revolutionise health care, farming, and education. He hoped it would be popular among the users in Bangladesh.
Prof Yunus asked Meta to organise month-long training programmes on Llama in Bangladesh.
"It will open up new opportunities for Bangladesh's young people," he said.
Probir Mehta, Director of Policy Planning of Meta; Lamiya Morshed, the SDG Coordinator of the Bangladesh government; and Tareq Ariful Islam, Bangladesh's permanent representative to Geneva, also joined the meeting.
