Protecting democracy is an arms race. Here’s how Facebook can help.

When you build services that connect billions of people across countries and cultures, you’re going to see all of the good that humanity can do, and you’re also going to see people try to abuse those services in every way possible. Our responsibility at Facebook is to amplify the good and mitigate the bad. This is especially true when it comes to elections. Key to our efforts has been finding and removing fake accounts — the source of much of the abuse, including misinformation. Increased transparency in our advertising systems is another area where we have also made progress. One of the biggest changes we’ve made over the past year is not to wait for reports of suspicious activity. Instead, we look proactively for potentially harmful election-related content, such as pages registered to a foreign entity that post divisive content to sow mistrust and drive people apart. For the US 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.

[Mark Zuckerberg is chief executive officer of Facebook]