Russian political Facebook ads were seen by up to 10m Americans

  • by Nick Cohen
  • in Industry
  • — Oct 4, 2017
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In September, the social media giant disclosed that accounts affiliated with Russian Federation bought more than $100,000 in election-related ads.

Facebook declined to expand on the nature of the ads found beyond its September 6 blog post that said "the ads and accounts appeared to focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum - touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights".

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the ads were part of a Russian-backed disinformation campaign against her.

The social network admitted last month that approximately 3,000 ads, connected to roughly 470 fake accounts and pages, had been run by Russian groups that violated its policies.

Facebook is cooperating with investigators on the House and Senate intelligence committees. The Campaign Legal Center is a nonprofit of Washington that supports for additional elections transparency, this week sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, the Chief Executive of Facebook, requesting that the firm publicly rolls out the content of the supposed Russia-connected political ads. The social network recently said that it would share details of these ads with Congress, but would not be making them public.

The Menlo Park, California-based company said that apart from hiring more people, they are also working on recognizing the patterns that trigger the potential meddling, and send such ads to the human moderators.

Facebook last month agreed to hand over information about the ads from the Internet Research Agency to special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of the 2016 election.

None of the companies have said whether they will accept the invitations. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence panel - have said they believe the American public should see them.

In an April white paper co-authored by Stamos Facebook revealed "information operations" were being carried out on the platform but did not name Russian Federation or attribute these campaigns.

"We will continue to work with Facebook and other tech companies to determine the full extent of Russia's use of online platforms, including paid advertising, since what we now know may only scratch the surface", Schiff said.

Though Twitter disclosed last week that the company found over 200 Russian accounts linked to propaganda pages.

Twitter's decision to share that information with Congress followed a report by the US government's top intelligence agencies, which slammed RT in January as the "Kremlin's principal worldwide propaganda outlet".

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