Mark Zuckerberg: Protecting democracy is an arms race. Here’s how Facebook can help. -- The Washington Post

Final paragraphs follow below; also see Jack, Sheryl and the empty chair: A preview of Silicon Valley’s trip to Washington (Recode)

"For the U.S. midterm elections we’re also using a new tool we tested in the Alabama Senate special election last year to identify political interference more quickly. This enabled us to find and remove foreign political spammers who’d previously flown under the radar. And last month, we took down hundreds of pages, groups and accounts for creating networks that were deliberately misleading people about their identities and intentions. Some originated in Iran and others in Russia.

I’m often asked how confident I feel about the midterms. We’ve made a lot of progress, as our work during the French, German, Mexican and Italian elections has shown. In each case, we identified and removed fake accounts and bad content leading up to the elections, and in Germany we worked directly with the government to share information about potential threats. The investments we continue to make in people and technology will help us improve even further. But companies such as Facebook face sophisticated, well-funded adversaries who are getting smarter over time, too. It’s an arms race, and it will take the combined forces of the U.S. private and public sectors to protect America’s democracy from outside interference."

Mark Zuckerberg: Protecting democracy is an arms race. Here’s how Facebook can help. -- The Washington Post