13/12/2017 Facebook to tell users if they interacted with Russia's 'troll army' | Technology | The Guardian

Facebook to tell users if they interacted with

Russia's 'troll army'
Social network says tool will let users see if they have liked or followed accounts created by organisation that
carries out misinformation operations

Alex Hern
Thursday 23 November 2017 09.45GMT

Facebook has promised to tell users whether they liked or followed a member of Russias
notorious troll army, accused of trying to inuence elections in the United States and the
United Kingdom.

The social network says it will create a tool allowing users to see whether they interacted with a
Facebook page or Instagram account created by the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a state-
backed organisation based in St Petersburg that carries out online misinformation operations.

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 statement. Thats
why as we have discovered information, we have continually come forward to share it publicly

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and have provided it to congressional investigators. And its also why were building the tool we
are announcing today.

The tool will not be able to warn everyone who may have seen content created by the IRA,
however. The company estimates that more than 140 million people, across both Facebook and
Instagram, may have seen a story or page initially created or shared by one of those Russian-run
accounts, in addition to the 10 million people who saw adverts bought by Russian state-sponsored
actors.

The majority of those people will not have liked or followed a Russian-backed account, instead
having seen the content when it was shared by friends or promoted on to their newsfeed through
some other facet of Facebooks curation algorithm.

Facebook will not tell those users about their exposure to misinformation, although the company
has not said whether it is unable, or simply unwilling, to provide that information. A source close
to the company described it as challenging to reliably identify and notify everyone who had
been incidentally exposed to foreign propaganda.

Facebook has also declined calls to be proactive about informing users of their interaction with
foreign propaganda. A mock-up of the tool provided by the company shows it in Facebooks help
centre, rather than in a more prominent position on the news feed. A Facebook spokesperson told
the Guardian: In the coming weeks, we will take signicant steps to make users aware of this
new tool. When the tool is available, the company says, it will be easily accessible at
Facebook.com/actionplan.

Both Facebook and Twitter have steadily been making public the results of their investigations
into Russian inuence operations on the 2016 US election.

In October, Twitter released to the US Congress a list of 2,752 accounts it believes were created by
Russian actors in an attempt to sway the election.

Damian Collins MP, the Conservative chair of the digital, culture, media and sport committee,
welcomed the new tool, but said there was more to be done by the company. Although the
Internet Research Agency is the most prolic Russian-backed disseminator of disinformation that
has been discovered so far, I believe that it is just the tip of an iceberg.

Facebook need to be developing tools that allow it to uncover fake news and fake accounts across
its platform, no matter where they are geographically located.

Both companies have yet to release equivalent information about an inuence campaign which is
believed to have occurred during the British referendum over EU membership. It is to be
welcomed that Facebook has now decided to provide transparency, as should all social media
platforms, said the Liberal Democrat MP and Brexit spokesperson, Tom Brake.

However, that is little consolation to the 73% of young voters who wanted to remain in the EU,
yet who now face the prospect of their futures being snatched away from them partly as a result of
Russian meddling in the EU referendum. We now need a full and independent inquiry to establish
the extent to which interference by foreign powers may have inuenced the result of one of the
most crucial British votes since the war.

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I will demand this in the cross-party three-hour debate on the subject of Russian interference in
UK politics I have secured on 21 December in the House of Commons.

Yin Yin Lu, a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute, agreed with the need for a separate
investigation into EU-specic interference. What we have so far is a subset of the fake US
accounts that happened to cross-post about Brexit as well, given the salience of the topic (which is
why many of them were especially active on the day after the referendum).

What we dont know and very much need if we hope to provide any substantial evidence about
Russian interference in Brexit on social media is if there is an equivalent list of fake UK
accounts.

In October Collins asked Facebook to investigate its own records for evidence that Russia-linked
accounts were used to interfere in the EU referendum, and later asked Twitter to do similar.
Collins gave the company a deadline of the end of November.

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