Facebook Inc. is stepping up its efforts to stop its platform being misused in order to influence political elections.

The social media giant Thursday announced a partnership with the Atlantic Council think tank, in order to “prevent [its] service from being abused during elections.” That practice came to the world’s attention during the 2016 U.S. presidential elections after it was revealed that Russia’s government had purchased ads with the intention of influencing the vote.

The Atlantic Council is a think thank that’s dedicated to promoting “constructive leadership and engagement in international affairs,” according to its website. It operates a Digital Forensic Research Lab that is now working with Facebook’s policy, product and security teams. They aim to gather insights on “emerging threats and disinformation,” or fake news, from around the world, Facebook’s global politics and government outreach director Katie Harbath said in a blog post.

The Digital Forensic Research Lab analyzes disinformation posted on social media and other platforms in order to try and detect what it calls “abuse.”

“We will not be monitoring elections for Facebook: it’s a company that will have a dedicated team expected to reach 20,000 people this year, aimed at doing that,” Graham Brookie, the lab’s director, wrote in another blog post. “Our mission will be to monitor the whole information space, from social media giants to emerging and locally relevant platforms to traditional media and to the engagement spaces in between.”

Facebook will also work with the think tank’s Digital Research Unit Monitoring Missions during elections. The social media company said it will help these missions to monitor false information and other kinds of disruption in specific geographic areas while also helping to educate citizens.

The effort to fight election manipulation around the world is not easy, partly because the vast majority of Facebook’s users are not U.S. citizens. Eighty-seven percent of its 2.2 billion users are located in other countries, and this presents enormous cultural and language barriers, Axios reported. These barriers hamper Facebook’s ability to understand when, where and how its platform is being abused, and that’s where the Atlantic Council’s expertise could come in handy.

Tech analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said it was good to see Facebook doing its part to ensure elections are more fair, but said it was uncertain how effective the partnership with the Atlantic Council would be. He told SiliconANGLE that outside forces have been interfering with elections for as long as mankind has had them, and that the phenomenon was unlikely to go away just because we’re in the 21st century and using social media.

“The interesting aspect of political meddling around elections is that the self-curation aspect that often works really well for social media does not work with political activity,” Mueller said. “Zuckerberg’s original stance was that bad actors are weeded out because users will call them out. But that’s not the case in our current society, as any news that fits a political agenda gets passed on, liked, et cetera, just because it fits a certain partisan view.”

Facebook has previously enlisted help from other organizations, including the International Fact-Checking Network, in order to combat fake news.

The company has also taken steps related to election meddling, including banning foreign ads targeting an upcoming referendum on abortion that’s due to take place in Ireland on May 25. Facebook has also said it will label political ads and reveal who has paid for them, while those who want to place such ads in the U.S. must now verify their identities.

Meanwhile, Facebook founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg is due to speak with European Union officials as early as next week about the company’s plans to prevent interference in political elections, and also about its role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal where the personal data of tens of millions of Facebook users was used without their permission.

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