The world of the Internet is no stranger to fake news and misconstrued information. With barrages of misinformation and fake news flooding into our social media platforms, Facebook has taken the initiative to detect data consisting of misinformation and make efforts to remove them.

Facebook released a 44-page report known as the ‘Threat Report on Influence Operations’ which provides insights into the extent of detection possible and the actions that would be taken to remove misinformation and any form of ill-intentioned activity.

The findings have been extended to politics (both at the national and domestic level), foreign political campaigns, and contains collective response to influence operations (IO).

According to Facebook, “To keep advancing our own understanding and that of the defender community across our industry, governments and civil society, we believe it’s important to step back and take a strategic view on the threat of covert IO. In our analysis, we looked at what’s changed, how threat actors have evolved, what have defenders done that’s worked and hasn’t.

This threat report draws on our existing public disclosures and our internal threat analysis to do four things: first, it defines how CIB manifests on our platform and beyond; second, it analyzes the latest adversarial trends; third, it uses the US 2020 elections to examine how threat actors adapted in response to better detection and enforcement; and fourth, it offers mitigation strategies that we’ve seen to be effective against IO.

While the defender community has made significant progress against IO, there’s much more to do. Known threat actors will continue to adapt their techniques and the new ones will emerge. Our hope is that this report will contribute to the ongoing work by the security community to protect public debate and deter covert IO.”

The report also details Facebook’s action to spread digital literacy education, their initiative towards the Free Basic Internet program, various improved detection programs to block out misinformed campaigns, and their intentions to expand to a broader set of networks as another means to avoid detection.