September 26, 2019: CODE PAKISTAN in partnership with Facebook organized a full-day workshop for CVE practitioners. The workshop was titled “Building Community Resilience in the Digital Age.” The workshop invited speakers from Facebook’s Asia Pacific headquarters located in Singapore from the departments of Public Policy, Counterterrorism Policy, and Outreach to provide organizational insights into the following topics: Facebook’s community standards, strategies for building community resilience using online campaigns, tools for creating engaging content and a showcase and discussion on effective national online campaigns.
Each of the sessions on the abovementioned topics was followed by a question and answer segment that allowed the audience, comprised of members from local civil society organizations as well as other development practitioners, to directly interact with the speakers to better understand the policy directives and practices that guide online activity on social media platforms such as Facebook. The discussions further touched on the type of content allowed on or flagged for removal on Facebook as well as the reasons why with many of the audience members referencing local and regional incidents to better understand Facebook’s policy practices within the context of Pakistan. The team of speakers addressed the individual questions with great attention while assuring the audience that Facebook regulations maintained a stance of neutrality and global uniformity, and were guided primarily by Facebook’s community standards, which were routinely updated to reflect changes in trends. Other questions were on issues pertaining to the guiding principles for designing a successful online campaign, the opportunities and challenges for community organizations in building a campaign designed to strengthen community resilience, and best practices for optimizing engagement and outreach of online content using social media platforms.
The participants of the workshop highly appreciated the efforts of CODE PAKISTAN and Facebook in holding the event. They remained engaged throughout all the sessions and expressed their hope that more such events would be organized in future as well.