Skip to main content

Facebook to expose Russian fake news pages

The social network has previously said as many as 126 million Americans may have seen content uploaded by Russia-based agents over the past two years.

It is building a tool to let people see whether they had followed now-deleted pages made by the Russia-based Internet Research Agency.

The tool will be launched in December.

The Internet Research Agency was behind hundreds of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts and posted thousands of politically-charged messages.

Many of the pages such as Heart Of Texas, Being Patriotic and Secured Borders were designed to look like they were created by US citizens.

Image copyrightFACEBOOK

Image captionFacebook hopes to launch the tool before the end of the year

In November 2016, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said it was a "pretty crazy idea" to suggest misinformation spread on the social network influenced the US presidential election.

Since then, the company has identified thousands of posts and paid advertisements placed by Russia-based operatives.

It has been criticised for allowing propaganda and fake news to spread on its platform and taking too long to address the problem.

Russia has repeatedly denied allegations that it attempted to influence the last US presidential election, in which Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton.

"It is important that people understand how foreign actors tried to sow division and mistrust using Facebook before and after the 2016 US election," Facebook said in a blog post.

"That's why, as we have discovered information, we have continually come forward to share it publicly and have provided it to congressional investigators.

"And it's also why we're building the tool we are announcing today."

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Dangerous sex Positions For Men

The most common cause of pénile injury is found among the variety of potentially dangerous positions used for séxual intercourse. The most popular is the ‘woman-on-top’. This type of position can result in an impact between the pénis against the female pelvis or perineum that can easily traumatize the pénile cylinders. A pénis becomes érect when the lining of the cylinder within it is engorged with blood.  A pénis fracture can occur when there is trauma to the eréct pénis, resulting in a rupture of the cylinder lining. This very painful injury is often accompanied by an abrupt, distressing cracking noise that is immediately followed by dark bruising of the pénis due to blood escaping the cylinder. In ten to 30% of pénis fractures, the urethra is damaged and blood may be visible at the urinary opening. Given these signs, an injury should be relatively simple to diagnose, right? You would be surprised, even with the unsettling sounds of a fracture occurring, many men...

Google Authenticator, a formidable layer of protection to your account.

​Google Authenticator is a free security app that can protect your accounts against password theft. It's easy to set up and can be used in a process called two-factor authentication (2FA) offered on popular social media services like Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.  The app ( iOS / Android ) generates a random code used to verify your identity when you're logging into various services. The code can technically be sent to your phone via text message every time— but the Google Authenticator app provides an extra level of security.  SMS-based 2FA has a  known security flaw , and any devoted hacker can attempt to  socially engineer  an attack against your phone company. The Google Authenticator app eliminates the possibility of an SMS-based attack  using algorithms  to generate the codes on your phone. Here's how to set it up: 1. Download Google Authenticator from either the Apple App Store or the Android Google Play store. It's free. 2. Nex...

AWS Battles Rivals: Advertising Campaign

Amazon Web Services has defeated IBM in a competition for lucrative federal contracts, threatened Microsoft's core businesses, and reshaped corporate technology. In the last few months, the pioneering cloud-computing unit of the online retail giant has taken a page from the playbook of some of its more traditional competitors: It started advertising. Ads have been splashed across billboards and in airport terminals, television spots and web videos, featuring a whiteboard full of sketches of software architecture and appeals to invent something using Amazon's collection of rented computing services. The advertising campaign, which bears the "Build On" tagline, represents a milestone in AWS' march from technology upstart to one of the major players in business software, technologists and marketers say. For many years, AWS didn't advertise, partly because it didn't have to. The service held a wide lead over the competition, and word-of-mouth was enough to...