Can Facebook win its battle against election interference in 2018?

Claims of Russian meddling dominated 2017. The US midterm elections will be first big test of Facebook's effort to stamp it out

Social networks spent much of 2017 slowly coming to terms with the extent to which their platforms had been exploited to spread political misinformation. But the narrow focus of investigations over the last year is likely to cause further pain in 2018, as the US midterm elections create a new urgency for the problem to be solved.

At the beginning of this year, Facebook was hostile to the suggestion that it may have played an unwitting part in a foreign influence campaign. After the election of Donald Trump, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, described the suggestion that his site may have swayed voters as a "crazy idea", despite evidence that hoaxes and lies had been spread on the social network during the campaign. (He later apologised for the comment, saying it was "dismissive and I regret it".)