Facebook Tool Shows If You Clicked On Russian Troll Farm Ads

Were you sucked in by one of those Russian troll farm ads during the 2016 election? The social media giant Facebook will tell you with a new tool that shows if you “liked” or followed any of the pages or accounts linked to Russian election propaganda.

The Russian ad campaign exposed the vulnerability of social media sites like Facebook, which was seeded with thousands of political ads during the 2016 election. Internet social media companies testifying this fall before Congress said the ads focused not so much on specific candidate as on divisive social issues, including the Black Lives Matter movement, Texas secession, the Second Amendment and illegal immigration.

“America, we have a problem,” Congressman Jackie Speier, a California Democrat who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, said at the time. “We basically have the brightest minds of our tech community here and Russia was able to weaponize your platforms to divide us, to dupe us and to discredit democracy.”

Congress has been reluctant to impose new regulations on private companies, but put the social media companies on notice that if they don’t impose new checks to help users of their platforms identify malicious content, lawmakers will.

“I must say, I don’t think you get it,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, told attorneys who testified at Senate Intelligence Committee hearings. “What we’re talking about is cataclysmic change. What we’re talking about is the beginning of cyber warfare … You have a huge problem on your hands. You created these platforms, and ow they are being misused. You have to be the ones to do something about it, or we will.”

Facebook said in November it planned to add about 10,000 engineers, ad reviewers, security experts and other staff to identify and remove fake accounts, and take other steps to "keep activity on Facebook authentic." Advertising will also be more transparent, with those paying for the ads to be clearly identified and verified, Facebook said.

The link to the tool is found on Facebook’s Help Center website. It tells users if they interacted with any of the accounts or pages created by the Internet Research Agency, the Russian company that created them.

Photo: Some of the Facebook and Instagram ads linked to a Russian effort to disrupt the American political process and stir up tensions around divisive social issues. (AP Photo/Jon Elswick)