Facebook tool lets you see if you followed the Russians
Facebook released a previously promised tool that lets you see if you've followed any of the fake pages meant to help Russia influence the 2016 presidential election.
The tool, which you can check here, shows if you've followed Facebook or Instagram accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency, the Russian organization that's been wreaking havoc for years, as outlined in this New York Times feature from June 2015 (published two weeks before Donald Trump entered the 2016 race).
If you're like me and are a Smart News Consumer™, you'll see this:
If you did like any of those pages, they'll appear in the list along with when you followed it.
While this is useful to an extent (where was this 15 months ago?), it doesn't actually tell you what, if any, fake news from the Agency you were actually exposed to, leaving that part of this whole mess still something of a mystery. Thanks to the way Facebook works, you don't have to be following one of these pages to have been exposed to something like, say, a meme of Jesus boxing Hillary.
Granted, we saw some of the posts as the social network shared hundreds of them with congressional members who, in turn, shared them with the public during various hearings.
So, once again, Facebook has taken a tiny step in the right direction, though it's a little sideways as you still can't tell your uncle that meme was made by Russians but at least you can prove that "Patriots For MAGA!!!!!" page he follows is the work of Putin's comrades.
Topics Facebook Social Media Elections Politics
Marcus Gilmer is Mashable's Assistant Real-Times News Editor on the West Coast, reporting on breaking news from his location in San Francisco. An Alabama native, Marcus earned his BA from Birmingham-Southern College and his MFA in Communications from the University of New Orleans. Marcus has previously worked for Chicagoist, The A.V. Club, the Chicago Sun-Times and the San Francisco Chronicle.
