Facebook Makes Election Security Promises

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is making some big promises regarding election security.

Zuckerberg detailed Facebook's goals in a blog post Thursday. In the post, he claims that the social media company will be prepared to fight any election interference occurring on the site and details the steps Facebook plans to take before the 2018 midterm elections in November.

Among them, Zuckerberg says fake accounts will be identified and removed, and false information will be removed or "contained."

In an effort to increase transparency, anyone who runs political or issue advertisements will be required to verify their identity and location. The company has also hired an additional 10,000 or so people to help complete these new tasks.

"Like most security issues, this is an arms race," Zuckerberg said. "The numbers are so large because our adversaries use computers to create fake accounts in bulk. And while we are quickly improving our ability to detect and block them, it is still very difficult to identify the most sophisticated actors who build their networks manually one fake account at a time."

Facebook isn't alone in touting their election security efforts. The Trump administration is prepping sanctions for those that attempt to meddle in upcoming elections, while key election officials have assured state officials that defenses are bolstered ahead of November.

Then again, an 11-year-old boy was recently able to hack a mock election site at DefCon, the annual hacker conference.