headlines. 87 million users data improperly shared with political consulting firm cambridge analytica back in march, putting ceo mark zuckerberg in the hot seat on capitol hill. this summer, facebook disclosed it blocked 1.3 billion fake accounts. and last month, 30 million accounts hacked, allowing cyber criminals to read your private messages and impersonate you. how confident are you that a facebook user, an american voter, will be safe from disinformation on election day? i mean, our goal is to make sure that the public debate around the election is authentic. that s our priority and that s what we re laser folks on. nothing has changed in that area. reporter: but critics, like recently departed facebook chief security officer, alex stamos, told us exclusively that social media companies are not doing enough. there s been small improvements in campaign security, but we have not seen the kind of massive upgrade in campaign infrastructure that you would need to stand against
2018 is an incredibly important year for elections. not just with the u.s. midterms, but around the world, there are important elections in india, in brazil and mexico and pakistan and in hungary that we want to make sure that we do everything we can to protect the integrity of those elections. now, i have more confidence that we re going to get this right. so just how confident is facebook less than one month until the midterms here in the u.s.? nbc s joelilee ling kent joins . what d you find? we spoke to facebook executives inside facebook headquarters. they told us they re reasonably confident that this is going to go better than 2016. they ve opened a war room to that effect, showing us around. we wanted to show you inside. facebook is on offense, after facing fallout from fake news and hacking scandals. many users wondering just what can be trusted in our feeds, ahead of the midterm elections, just 19 days away. welcome to the war room. thank you. now the social med
that. now, facebook is also telling me they re relying on individual users to report false news and bogus posts and then they ll downgrade them. sometimes they ll remove those posts. but it is a monumental task that they re trying to combine with artificial intelligence as well, kasie. and jo, where are most of the threats coming from on facebook ahead of this election? that s a really good question. we continue to see threats on facebook from russia and iran, but most interestingly, with a lot of the disinformation, the sewing inin ining of confusion from domestic sources and that s what facebook is really grappling with right now. not just facebook, but reddit and twitter. this is a cross-social media issue and there s only 19 days to go. we re see if they re actually able to make a difference here with things like war rooms. an important story just a couple of weeks out. nbc s jolee ling kent, thanks v much. thanks. coming up, canada is the first major world economy to l