Quote:The social platform, which has taken various steps towards protecting elections from abuse and exploitation on its platform, including the take down of fake pages and accounts involved in political influence campaigns, is now launching new tools to defend candidates and campaign staff.

Both hackers and foreign adversaries might be particularly interested in targeting Facebook users who are associated with political campaigns, Facebook says.

The social network already has in place a series of security tools and procedures to stay ahead of bad actors who attempt to use Facebook to disrupt elections, and a newly announced pilot program is meant to complement those.

The new pilot program is open for candidates for federal or statewide office, as well as for staff members and representatives from federal and state political party committees, Facebook announced. The additional security protections can be added both to Pages and to accounts.