Inside the Research Lab Teaching Facebook About Its Trolls

In late July, a group of high-ranking Facebook executives organized an emergency conference call with reporters across the country. That morning, Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, explained, they had shut down 32 fake pages and accounts that appeared to be coordinating disinformation campaigns on Facebook and Instagram. They couldn’t pinpoint who was behind the activity just yet, but said the accounts and pages had loose ties to Russia’s Internet Research Agency, which had spread divisive propaganda like a flesh-eating virus throughout the 2016 US election cycle.

Facebook was only two weeks into its investigation of this new network, and the executives said they expected to have more answers in the days to come. Specifically, they said some of those answers would come from the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Research Lab. The group, whose mission is to spot, dissect, and explain the origins of online disinformation, was one of Facebook’s newest partners in the fight against digital assaults on elections around the world. “When they do that analysis, people will be able to understand better what’s at play here,” Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, said.