You could soon see whether you interacted with Russian propaganda on Facebook and Instagram during the 2016 election.
On Wednesday, Facebook announced a new portal that lets users see which Internet Research Agency-linked Facebook pages or Instagram accounts they liked or followed between January 2015 and August 2017, when the pages were shut down.
The Internet Research Agency is a troll farm with ties to the Russian government.
“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 wrote in a blog post.
The new tool will be available by the end of the year via the social network’s Help Center.
Facebook said the portal is part of its continuing effort to “protect” its platforms and users from “bad actors who try to undermine our democracy.”
However, not all of those users will be able to take advantage of the portal. The tool applies to users who followed or liked those accounts. It won’t work for users who saw posts from the accounts on their feed because a friend liked them or who saw them via paid advertisements. Users will also have to know the feature exists and how to access it — Facebook will not simply show the information to them on its own.
At a House Intelligence Committee hearing on November 1, Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch said: “It’s a much more challenging issue to identify and notify reliably people who may have been exposed to this content on an individual basis.”
Facebook estimates that close to 150 million Americans may have been exposed to content from the Internet Research Agency between June 2015 and August 2017 on Facebook and Instagram.
California Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, who is the Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee, called Facebook’s move a “very positive step.”
“During our open hearing with Facebook, Twitter and Google earlier this month, we asked them to notify their users if they had been targeted by or seen content as part of the Russian active measures campaign,” Schiff said in a statement.
“We look forward to additional steps by the companies to improve transparency with respect to Russian abuse of their platforms, and urge them to furnish a joint report on how Russia used these platforms to sow discord and influence the election.”
