Russian bots have been in the news a lot lately. We’re not talking Robocop or Terminator style war machines here, we’re talking Twitter bots and social media machines. They’ve been creating and sharing content designed to whip up tribal emotions and sow disunity across the progressive world.
This all comes mostly in the form of right wing, anti-immigrant, and
nationalist rhetoric but the hard left has also seen its fair share of targeted nonsense designed to galvanize their point of view.
It isn’t just bots either. Troll farms in Russia have hundreds of
employees spewing out exactly what extremists want to hear so that
thousands of bots can then like and legitimize the extreme point of view.
The results have seen chaos reign with the results of the 2016 British Referendum on Membership of the EU and the US Presidential Election
of the same year heavily affected by these false social media
campaigns. As well as the uncertain future now facing the Western world,
with the UK now set to withdraw from the most successful peace treaty
ever drafted and the US publicly scorning NATO, the social networks that facilitated this spread of misinformation have come under a lot of fire. In response to this; Facebook has acted and will help users to find out if they liked, followed, or shared content created by a Russian linked organization called The Internet Research Agency. Facebook said:
“As part of that continuing commitment, we will soon be creating a
portal to enable people on Facebook to learn which of the Internet
Research Agency Facebook Pages or Instagram accounts they may have liked
or followed between January 2015 and August 2017. This tool will be
available for use by the end of the year in the Facebook Help Center.”
The Internet Research Agency is a name used by Russia’s troll farm.
They operated across a range of social networks including Facebook and
Twitter. Before Facebook removed them from The Internet Research Agency
was running accounts like Secured Borders, which posted US based anti-immigration content. It was made to appear that local grass-roots organizations in the US were sponsoring the page but it turned out that the Kremlin was responsible for the page.
The new tool that Facebook will be rolling out will help users to find out about the other pages that were run by The Internet Research Agency and if they liked or shared any of its content.
What do you think about this news from Facebook? Is it too little too
late or are you happy to see Facebook taking a stand against the types
of actions that put an informed democracy at risk? Are you even worried
at all about these types of accounts? We’d love to know your thoughts on this issue and hope to hear from you in the comments below.
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