Facebook Discloses New Disinformation Campaigns From Russia and Iran

Yet even as Facebook has advocated free speech, it has been unable to stem the disinformation that people post on its site. On Monday, the company said the disinformation campaigns it removed included content that touched on conflict in the Middle East, racial strife and posts involving Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democratic congresswoman from New York. The posts crossed categories and ideological lines, seemingly with no specific intent other than to foment discord among citizens in multiple countries.

Mr. Zuckerberg said that over the past three years, Facebook has become better able to seek out and remove foreign influence networks, relying on a team of former intelligence officials, digital forensics experts and investigative journalists. Facebook has more than 35,000 people working on its security initiatives, with an annual budget well into the billions of dollars.

But as Facebook has honed its skills, so have its adversaries, he said. He added that there has been an escalation of sophisticated attacks coming from Iran and China — beyond the initial disinformation campaigns from Russia in 2016 — suggesting that the practice has only grown more popular over the past few years. A cottage industry of companies has also sprung up, he said, selling disinformation services targeted to Facebook to governments and other bad actors.

While the company does not want to be an arbiter of what speech is allowed on its site, Facebook said it wanted to be more transparent about where the speech is coming from. To that end, it will now apply labels to pages considered state-sponsored media — including outlets like Russia Today — to inform people whether the outlets are wholly or partially under the editorial control of their country’s government. The company will also apply the labels to the outlet’s Facebook Page, as well as make the label visible inside of the social network’s advertising library.

“We will hold these Pages to a higher standard of transparency because they combine the opinion-making influence of a media organization with the strategic backing of a state,” Facebook said in a blog post.

The company said it developed its definition of state-sponsored media with input from more than 40 outside global organizations, including Reporters Without Borders, the European Journalism Center, Unesco and the Center for Media, Data and Society.

The company will also more prominently label posts on Facebook and on its Instagram app that have been deemed partly or wholly false by outside fact-checking organizations. Facebook said the change was meant to help people better determine what they should read, trust and share. The label will be displayed prominently on top of photos and videos that appear in the news feed, as well as across Instagram stories.

It may be difficult to determine how much of a difference the new, more aggressive labels will make. Home to more than 2.7 billion regular users, Facebook and Instagram see billions of pieces of content shared to their respective networks daily. Fact-checked news and posts represent a fraction of that content. A wealth of information is also spread privately across Facebook’s messaging services like WhatsApp and Messenger, two conduits that have been identified as prime channels for spreading misinformation.

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