Securing Your Social Media Accounts with Facebook Protect

Social media is critical to most campaigns providing opportunities to interact with supporters, convey key messages, fundraise, and advertise. In this COVID-19 world we are currently living in, social media platforms have become imperative to maintaining connections through engaging posts and live online events that replace retail politics, the lifeblood of many campaigns.

Successful social media efforts require constant engagement with the platform. Therefore, campaigns frequently have multiple people—staffers and volunteers—managing pages, posting information, and responding to comments, potential voters, and supporters.

Unfortunately, social media platforms are also used in nefarious ways as well. Bad actors can try and hack social media accounts to post false and misleading information appearing to come from the campaign, comment with links to bad information or phishing sites, try and agitate supporters, and more. 

Campaigns need to balance the good that comes from the reach and engagement of social networks while protecting against the risks.

Facebook has a special program for campaigns called Facebook Protect (https://www.facebook.com/gpa/facebook-protect).  The program is voluntary and helps Facebook to more quickly detect any potentially suspicious account activity by monitoring for attempts to hack the account, such as unusual login locations or unverified devices.

Facebook Protect is designed for:

  • Candidates of federal, state and local offices and their campaign staff

  • Federal, state and local elected officials and their staff

  • Representatives from federal and state political party committees and their staff

  • Federal, state and local agencies and departments’ Page admins who have a role in the elections process

  • Any person or group with a blue badge-verified Page who is involved in the elections process

To get started with Facebook Protect, your page needs to be blue badge-verified. To start the process of verification you can go here: https://www.facebook.com/help/1288173394636262

If you use other Facebook products, increase your level of security by turning multifactor authentication: 

At Defending Digital Campaigns, we offer free and reduced-price cybersecurity services to help campaigns implement better cybersecurity. We can also help you onboard cybersecurity products and services we make available, including helping you secure your Facebook account. 

We are thrilled to partner with Facebook to help campaigns secure their social media! The best way for campaigns to get started is to have a quick call with us. Please reach out to info@defendcampaigns.org to schedule an introductory call.