A great article at The Daily Dot by Alex Thomas has the latest. Take a look:

After foreign actors used Facebook to reach people during the 2016 election and sow discord, the platform came under pressure to make some significant changes. When he testified before Congress, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said: “One of my greatest regrets in running the company is that we were slow in identifying the Russian information operations in 2016.”

One of the changes that they implemented was building a tool that outlined the ads that politicians run on Facebook. They announced that tool in June 2018, saying: “The vast majority of ads on Facebook are run by legitimate organizations … But we’ve seen that bad actors can misuse our products, too.”

The new gadget left a lot to be desired and Facebook quietly coded out other, more comprehensive tools and plugins that flagged political ads on the platform—like one built by ProPublica that showed why you were served certain ads.

Read the full article here. Money politics has long dominated American politics, but the scale of the problem has gotten much worse since the Supreme Court made its infamous 2010 ruling known as: Citizens United. This is despite the fact that evidence is growing that small donors can fund political campaigns if they get some support such as through a voluntary public matching funds program. New York City’s unique system of matching funds for small donors has gotten particular attention. Also visit Democracy Chronicles main sections on Money Politics and American Democracy.