Social networking platform Facebook Saturday said it will encourage engagement between people and political leaders on its platform for 'free and fair election' and deploy task force to check hate speeches during polls. "We want our platform to support free and fair election and positive civic engagement. We welcome people to engage with their political leaders but we dont want people to abuse that," Richard Allan, VP Global Policy Solutions, Facebook, told reporters.

The company has faced criticism for misuse of its platform for manipulating views during elections, spreading hate speech etc. Facebook has come up with a policy around hate speech under which it removes content that intend to spread hate speech and violence etc. Allan said that the abuse differs from country to country but principle is same, and Facebook is accordingly fine tuning its policy to address the issue. "When we see elections coming up, obviously India is top of mind, biggest democracy in the world, so we have a task force working on that -security specialist, content specialist. We trying to understand what is possible form of abuse in India versus UK versus any other country," he said.