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Worried that you might have been been ensnared by the Russian misinformation campaign during the 2016 election?
Facebook introduced a tool to help you figure out if you followed a Facebook page or Instagram account run by Russia‘s troll army, the Internet Research Agency.
The social network is trying to address criticism, in Congress and elsewhere, that it failed to do enough to stop misinformation from spreading on its sprawling platform during the 2016
presidential election. Facebook admits that some 140 million users may have been exposed to propaganda on their News Feeds or on Instagram.
Facebook is eager to show how it’s working to protect legitimate political discussion on the platform, and shield it from foreign actors. It says it plans to hire 10,000 engineers, security
experts and others to augment the work of machine learning and artificial intelligence in identifying and removing fake accounts. It also will block ads from pages that repeatedly share fake
news stories (based on third-party fact-checking organizations).
The social network said it has take steps to make advertising more transparent — something Senators talked about during recent hearings. Facebook is building tools to make it clear who is
paying for political ads by simply clicking a link.
“We take this issue seriously and are committed to doing our part to help prevent foreign interference in the future,” Facebook said in a statement.