24 November 2017

Facebook is now going to let you find out if you were manipulated by Russian propaganda. Spoiler alert: You probably were.

Courtesy of Bloomberg:  

Facebook Inc. will show people which Russian propaganda pages or accounts they�ve followed and liked on the social network, responding to a request from Congress to address manipulation and meddling during the 2016 presidential election.

The tool will appear by the end of the year in Facebook�s online support center, the company said in a blog post Wednesday. It will answer the user question, �How can I see if I�ve liked or followed a Facebook page or Instagram account created by the Internet Research Agency?� That�s the Russian firm that created thousands of incendiary posts from fake accounts posing as U.S. citizens. People will see a list of the accounts they followed, if any, from January 2015 through August 2017.

It�s Facebook�s most direct effort to explain to users how they may have been affected by the IRA�s postings, which reached an estimated 150 million people and stirred up controversy over gun rights, immigration, race relations and religion in the U.S., sometimes prompting real-world protests on both sides of a debate. 

�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 the post.

I know my headline seems a little assholey, but even if you did not participate on Facebook, friends and family members who you spoke to very likely did.  

So while they were expressing their political point of view to you, it is quite likely, whether they were conservatives or liberals, that the Russians helped to influence it just a little.

I told you about that one friend at the gym who said that he saw a photo of Hillary Clinton standing among dead bodies that convinced him she was a war monger.

I never saw such a picture, and believe me I looked for it, but it still bothered me. It manipulated my emotions to some degree.

In the end if you did not vote for Hillary Clinton, which seems to have been the absolute focus of this propaganda, then it is more than likely that you were at least subliminally influenced by something the Russians sent out on social media.

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