Zuckerberg Facebook Post Says Facebook Will Fight Election Interference
Image by getty images
By Josh Nathan-Kazis September 14, 2018
In a lengthy statement posted Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced efforts to prevent bad actors from using his social network to interfere in elections.
The statement comes amid ongoing revelations about Russian efforts to use social media to disrupt U.S. elections in 2016.
Zuckerberg wrote that Facebook has new technology to combat fake accounts, new tools to inhibit the spread of misinformation, and will make it more clear who paid for particular political ads, among other initiatives.
“In 2016, our election security efforts prepared us for traditional cyberattacks like phishing, malware, and hacking,” Zuckerberg wrote. “What we didn’t expect were foreign actors launching coordinated information operations with networks of fake accounts spreading division and misinformation.”
Zuckerberg boasted in his statement that, in recent months, Facebook has taken down “coordinated information campaigns” out of Iran, Russia, Brazil, and Myanmar.
Last week, Facebook took down two Facebook pages that had been part of an anonymous digital campaign by the Israel on Campus Coalition following queries from the Forward and ProPublica, which published a story about the campaign.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
