Facebook tells users who ‘liked’ Russian posts

FACEBOOK plans to show its users if they “liked” content created by Russian-backed fake news sites during the US presidential election.

US intelligence agencies are currently investigating the impact of Russian meddling on the outcome of last year’s election. Earlier this month, Facebook revealed that as many as 126million Americans may have seen content from Russia-based agents on the site over the past two years.

The social network has announced it is developing a tool to let people see whether they followed pages made by the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency, which was behind hundreds of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts, and posted thousands of politically-charged messages.

Many of the pages, such as Heart Of Texas, Being Patriotic and Secured Borders, were designed to look they were created by US citizens.

Russia has denied allegations that it attempted to influence the last US presidential election, despite claims by US intelligence agencies that it tried to tip the election in Donald Trump’s favour.

From next month, the Facebook tool allows users to see which of the posts and pages they “liked” between Jan 2015 and Aug 2017, when the pages were shut down, were Russian generated. like