Facebook says it will show geographic origin of some posts, to thwart foreign political disinformation campaigns

On Wednesday, Facebook said it will label posts from popular accounts to reveal their geographic origin, an attempt to limit election-year political misinformation by foreign entities.

Often, such accounts attempt to trick the user into believing they are legitimate groups and political parties based in the United States.

Today we're beginning to show the location of high-reach Facebook Pages and Instagram accounts on *every post they share.* Really proud of the teams continuing to increase transparency like this. https://t.co/jwFg34bttp pic.twitter.com/w3UdYkQ1NS

— Nathaniel Gleicher (@ngleicher) April 22, 2020

Here is the official announcement from Facebook.

More from AP:

The new policy will apply to popular pages about elections, entertainment and other topics and will stamp every post they make on Facebook and Instagram with its origin. For instance, an Instagram account targeting U.S. voters but based in Brazil will have every post labeled with Based in Brazil. Users then can swipe to find out more information about the account.

Its the social networks latest attempt to fight election-related misinformation. Russia and other countries have been using social media to try to influence political discourse in the U.S. and elsewhere, often by masquerading as local interest groups.

Facebook will initially target pages based outside of the U.S. that reach a large number of people inside the U.S. The labels, the company says, will help people gauge the reliability and authenticity of what they see.

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