Facebook will Strengthen the Fight against Russian Interference
By Prempal Singh
Facebook will Strengthen the Fight against Russian Interference –
The company acknowledged that they underestimated the degree of danger of “the use by third-party players of social media as an information weapon.”
The American Facebook Corporation will require identification from organizations that host election-related advertising on the social network. This measure is taken as a preventive measure attributed to Russia in the election processes in the United States, said on Monday, Facebook product manager Samid Chakrabarti, who oversees the company’s interaction with the public.
He acknowledged the company’s failure to underestimate the danger level of “the use by third-party players of social media as an information weapon.” “Although we did not suspect this, during the elections in the US in 2016, Russian entities created 80,000 posts, which in two years reached about 126 million people in the United States,” Chakrabarty said. “It was a new type of threat that we could not easily predict, but we could do more,” he admitted.
The representative of Facebook assured that at the moment the company’s management “makes up for lost time”, including by developing new measures and tools to counter “Russian interference”.
(Cyberops, Cyberops Infosec, VAPT, Cyber Security, Ethical Hacking, Secured Application Development)
“Soon we will demand from organizations that place advertising related to the election to confirm their ownership so that users can see who paid for this advertisement,” Chakrabarty said.
Facebook intends to archive samples of electoral advertising and make them searchable to improve reporting, he added.
US media and lawmakers in recent months have repeatedly argued that Russia allegedly placed political advertising in American social networks to influence the outcome of the 2016 election in the United States. In November 2017 representatives of Twitter, Google and Facebook spoke in connection with this at a hearing in the US Congress.
The press secretary of the Russian president Dmitry Peskov, who commented on the allegations on this topic earlier, said that the Kremlin has nothing to do with the placement of political advertising in social networks and does not know who is behind such orders.