Facebook promises to beef up “election integrity” efforts heading into 2020

Enlarge / Facebook's election "War Room" on Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2018. (credit: David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images)

With 379 long, long days to go until the 2020 US presidential election, Facebook is promising to do a better job than it did in 2016 of preventing bad actors, both foreign and domestic, from abusing its platform to potentially affect the outcome.

The company unveiled a slew of "election integrity efforts" today, saying the measures will "help protect the democratic process" by identifying threats, closing vulnerabilities, and reducing "the spread of viral misinformation and fake accounts."

The sheer scope of the problem is admittedly mind-boggling but perhaps unsurprising, given that Facebook's most recent investor report claimed more than 2.4 billion monthly active users on the platform (Instagram also boasts more than 1 billion MAUs). Company CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a call with reporters that the company spends "billions" on security annually, totaling more in a given year than Facebook's annual revenue at the time it went public. (For context, Facebook went public in 2012; it posted total revenues of just about $5 billion for that fiscal year. Its total revenue for 2018 was about $55.8 billion.)