San Francisco, April 9: In yet another bid to prevent fake news and foreign interference in upcoming elections globally including in India, Facebook on Monday announced a new initiative to help provide credible research about the role of social media in elections. At the heart of this initiative will be a group of scholars who will define the research agenda; solicit proposals for independent research on a range of different topics; and mage a peer-review process to select scholars who will receive funding for their research — as well as access to privacy-protected datasets from Facebook which they can alyse. “Our goals are to understand Facebook’s impact on upcoming elections — like Brazil, India, Mexico and the US midterms — and to inform our future product and policy decisions,” Elliot Schrage, Vice President of Communications and Public Policy, and David Ginsberg, Director of Research at Facebook, said in a blog post.