Facebook will show users what Russian propaganda they 'liked'

2025-04-27 20:55:34admin

Exciting news for Facebook users. In the near future, the social network will reveal what Russian propaganda users were exposed to during the 2016 presidential election.

A list of Facebook Pages or Instagram accounts will appear in a new online portal within Facebook's Help Center and will be available to all users by the end of the year, Facebook announced in a blog post Wednesday.

SEE ALSO: Facebook's effort to stop the spread of propaganda and misinformation just isn't working

The reveal is all a part of Facebook's attempt to make up for allowing Russian trolls to interfere with the election. Accounts linked to the Internet Research Agency (IRA) created posts to manipulate voters during the 2016 election and reached more than 150 million people. For example, Russians created Facebook events for rallies around pro-Trump policies like anti-immigration. One ad depicted Hillary Clinton as the devil boxing Jesus.

Shortly after the election last year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg downplayed the significance of the issue, referring to his platform helping manipulate the election as a "pretty crazy idea." Since then, his company has had to come forward with embarrassing details on its fake news problem and the massive number of users Russian propaganda reached.

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U.S. lawmakers have urged Facebook to be more transparent about its role and to take immediate action to prevent election interference from happening again. Representatives from Facebook along with Google and Twitter testified on the ordeal earlier this month.

Unfortunately, Facebook isn't disclosing what exact ads and other posts users saw. They're only listing accounts they followed from January 2015 to August 2017 that were tied to the IRA. Still, it's a step toward transparency.

"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 wrote in a blog post.

At least, it's something the company is doing themselves to amend the problem rather than relying on others to fix it.

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