The Menlo Park, California-based company Meta says it will open an $800 million data center in Montgomery. The internet giant operates Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp. Its technology arm Meta Platforms will support one hundred operational jobs and build on the company’s previous investment in Huntsville.
The 715,000-square-foot, AI-optimized data center will be built off Interstate 65 in Montgomery. The site is across from the Hyundai automotive assembly plant. It will join the company’s other Alabama data center campus in Huntsville. Meta’s investment Alabama represents an investment of $1.5 billion. The company says the land for the facility is being cleared, and about a thousand workers will be on the project at its height.
The Meta project means jobs and dollars in Alabama. But, the company’s huge social media footprint has generated controversy, particularly when it comes to disinformation. One example is reflected in coverage by The Associated Press on those concerns as voters in India head to the polls. In a year crowded with big elections, the sprawling vote in India stands out. The world’s most populous country boasts dozens of languages, the greatest number of WhatsApp users as well as the largest number of YouTube subscribers. Nearly 1 billion voters are eligible to cast a ballot in the election, which runs into June.
Tech companies like Google and Meta, the owner of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, say they are working to combat deceptive or hateful content while helping voters find reliable sources. But researchers who have long tracked disinformation in India say their promises ring hollow after years of failed enforcement and “cookie-cutter” approaches that fail to account for India's linguistic, religious, geographic and cultural diversity.
Given India's size and its importance for social media companies, you might expect more of a focus, say disinformation researchers who focus on India.
“The platforms are earning money off of this. They are benefiting from it, and the whole country is paying the price,” said Ritumbra Manuvie a law professor at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Manuvie is a leader of The London Story, an Indian diaspora group which last month organized a protest outside Meta’s London offices.
Research by the group and another organization, India Civil Watch International, found that Meta allowed political advertisements and posts that contained anti-Muslim hate speech, Hindu nationalist narratives, misogynistic posts about female candidates as well as ads encouraging violence against political opponents.
The ads were seen more than 65 million times over 90 days earlier this year. Together they cost more than $1 million.
Meta defends its work on global elections and disputed the findings of the research on India, noting that it has expanded its work with independent fact-checking organizations ahead of the election, and has employees around the world ready to act in case its platforms are misused to spread misinformation. Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, said of India's election: “It’s a huge, huge test for us.”
“We have months and months and months of preparation in India,” he told The Associated Press during a recent interview. “We have teams working around the clock. We have fact checkers in multiple languages operating in India. We have a 24-hour escalation system.”
