Facebook Tool Shows If You Were Influenced By Russian Fake News Troll Army

Facebook has rolled out a new tool that allows you to see if you liked any information that was linked to the Russian accounts accused of having been influential during the 2016 U.S. Presidential election. According to U.S. intelligence agencies, the Russian government exploited social media, particularly targeting Facebook,to influence the outcome of the election. 

The Facebook tool is a page on their Help Center that the user must log into using their credentials or with their Instagram account. Once logged in, the user can then see if they were influenced by the Internet Research Agency (IRA), which is a Russian agency that is associated with spreading false information and inflammatory ads.

Facebook told a Senate Judiciary committee during testimony back in October that over the course of three years about 29 million people were delivered content from pages related to the IRA and that Facebook believes as many as 126 million people could have seen that content. If you want to see if you were influenced by accounts linked with the IRA, the Facebook tool is here.

Facebook says that it shutdown 5.8 million fake accounts in the U.S. in the weeks leading up to the 2016 Presidential elections. Facebook recently announced that it would be eliminating the disputed flag that it has been using for about a year to allow users to flag content they think is false. The problem according to Facebook is that the red disputed flag may have given users the wrong impression leading to inaccurate news reports being share more often.