MANILA, Philippines – Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on his platform that they will be rolling out a tool that will allow people to check if they liked or followed an account controlled by the Internet Research Agency (IRA). 

The IRA is a Russian agency the Facebook has discovered to have interfered in elections in the US, Europe, and Russia itself. The organization manipulates opinion and views by spreading propaganda through a network of accounts on widely-used social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook itself. 

The tool, which Zuckerberg says will be coming out in the next few weeks, is a way to let people know if they might have been influenced by an IRA-controlled account in the past. 

Zuckerberg mentioned the new tool in a post that announced their banishing of 270 IRA-controlled accounts specifically targeting “people living in Russia,” and  “people speaking Russian in neighboring countries like Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Ukraine.” 

Some of the pages they took down belonged to Russian news organizations, Zuckerberg added, with at least one account having one million followers, and one Instagram account having 500,000 followers. 

The full post appears below: 

The Facebook CEO is said to have agreed to testify before Congress to address matters related to its most recent scandal involving Cambridge Analytica; and likely, matters concerning the IRA, which Facebook sold ads to during the 2016 US presidential elections. – Rappler.com