Following the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Facebook was slammed for not doing enough to prevent the spread of misinformation on its platform. As a result, the social media giant has stepped up its efforts this time around to ensure foreign bad actors aren’t abusing the site to influence the outcome. And this week, Facebook announced that it caught a small network of 13 fake accounts and two pages that were associated with Russian operatives.
Thankfully, Facebook caught this network in its infancy before it had the chance to attract a large audience. However, it had already recruited innocent U.S. freelance journalists to write articles promoting their propaganda. Still, Facebook was quick to trumpet its success.
“They’ve gotten better at hiding who they are, but their impact has gotten smaller and smaller,” Facebook’s head of security policy Nathaniel Gleicher told The Washington Post.
While cases like this one are certainly an improvement over where Facebook was in 2016, it’s still troubling how easily these foreign actors could get set up — and even actively recruit Americans — on the platform. Facebook won’t ever be perfect, but it’s clear that there’s still a ton of room for improvement when it comes to stopping scams like this.
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