The extent of Russian meddling in the 2016 US Presidential Elections that we all witnessed Donald Trump surprisingly winning against a powerful Hillary Clinton is the subject of multiple investigations and a U.S. intelligence community assessment that the country waged overt and covert campaigns in an attempt to interfere with the political process. And Facebook has been under intense scrutiny for the role its platform played in the election.
However, Donald Trump rejects the accusations as “ridiculous” of U.S. Intelligence’s reports that suggests Russia intervened in the presidential election on his behalf through targeted hacking, putting him at odds with top lawmakers who vowed to investigate the findings. While on the other hand, the accused, the Russians vehemently denies accusations of interference in the U.S. election. Social network giant, Facebook, previously denied any Russian interference in the election, till just last month when evidence became overwhelming.
Therefore, after Facebook acknowledged Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential Election created a tool that will let people see what content they liked or followed between January 2015 and August 2017 that came from Internet Research Agency, the Kremlin-linked troll farm that tried to influence Americans during the presidential campaign. This new tool for spotting posts from a Russian troll farm will be available by the end of the year. Facebook says it’s trying to be more transparent about how Russian agents used the social network to meddle with last year’s US election.
The tool will show you what you liked on both Facebook and Instagram, which Facebook owns. It will be available at Facebook’s help center page by the end of the year.
“It is important that people understand how foreign actors tried to sow division and mistrust using Facebook before and after the 2016 US election,” the company said in a blog post.
Facebook has been under intense scrutiny for the role its platform played in the election. In September, CEO Mark Zuckerberg disclosed Facebook sold $100,000 worth of ads to Russian-linked accounts. Later that month, Facebook said Russian-backed content, which includes also includes unpaid “organic” posts, was seen by more than 126 million people on the social network. That number goes up when you include content on Instagram.
Facebook, along with rivals Google and Twitter, was grilled by lawmakers over the matter earlier this month during three congressional hearings on Capitol Hill.
The tool will have limitations. It will only notify you if you directly followed or liked an IRA post, not if a post from the group simply showed up on your feed because a friend liked it.
