How to find out if the government is spying on your Facebook account

Earlier this year we wrote how the government quietly announced it was stepping up its monitoring of Facebook, Twitter and blogs to see how often people were mentioning ministers online.

Now, Facebook has announced it will inform users if their accounts are being spied upon by any government.

In a note on Facebook, the company's security chief Alex Stamos said people would be notified if there is evidence their profile has been "targeted or compromised by an attacker suspected of working on behalf of a nation-state".

The alert would look like this:

Stamos wrote:

While we have always taken steps to secure accounts that we believe to have been compromised, we decided to show this additional warning if we have a strong suspicion that an attack could be government-sponsored. We do this because these types of attacks tend to be more advanced and dangerous than others, and we strongly encourage affected people to take the actions necessary to secure all of their online accounts.

You can read the full post below:

More: The government is about to start spying on your Facebook and Twitter feeds a lot more

More: Eight things we learned from Edward Snowden's first BBC interview