"John Hegeman, Facebook’s head of News Feed, told members of Team MT in a sit-down at the company’s D.C. HQ that Facebook would now spot a trolling operation on the level of Russia’s meddling Internet Research Agency, thanks to the scores of changes made to the site since election day 2016. “Would we catch 100 percent of everything they do? No,” said Hegeman. But with all the tweaks Facebook has since scrambled to make to limit the damage of bad information — from auto-detecting imposter accounts to working with third-party fact checkers — said Hegeman, “we would not be able to have something on the scale like [the IRA] today. We’d be able to prevent that.”
But when it comes to “fake news,” one thing worth noting: It’s not enough to get you booted from Facebook. IRA trolls violated Facebook’s community standards, like misrepresenting their identities — a bannable offense. “But we don’t kick people off just for saying something that’s false,” explained Hegeman. That’s a peek into the complexities that Facebook’s wrestling with going into the midterms. “There is this core tension, which is that we want to be a platform for free expression” while also combating misinformation, said Hegeman. The preferable option to outright censorship, in Facebook’s
view? Pushing misleading content lower down so that many users never even see it, or blocking advertisers' ability to make money on it."
Read the Full Piece: Facebook: We'd Catch Russia's Troll Farm Today (Politico)