Facebook is creating an online tool to allow users to determine if they might have been exposed to Russian disinformation during the 2016 presidential election and its fractious aftermath, the company announced Wednesday.
The new tool, which the company said will be available by the end of the year, is the latest move by Facebook to respond to public and political pressure to reveal the extent of the Russian disinformation campaign waged on its social media platform and on Instagram, which Facebook owns.
Together nearly 150 million Facebook and Instagram users may have had pieces of Russian disinformation content - both paid ads and free posts - reach their accounts, the company has said, though it also has said there is no way to know how many actually saw that content.
The new tool will be an online portal, available through Facebook's "Help Center." It will allow users to see if pages or accounts they "liked" or followed between January 2015 and August 2017 were created by the Internet Research Agency, a St. Petersburg troll farm that Russian operatives used to pump divisive content on race, religion, gun rights, immigration and other issues into the American online political conversation.
Some of the Russian pages and accounts explicitly called for the election of Republican Donald Trump or denigrated his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, and some others called for real-world political rallies - many heeded those calls by showing up at the time and places dictated by the Russian trolls.
