More than half of the 10 million Americans estimated to have seen Russian-linked political ads saw them after Election Day in 2016, according to Facebook.
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The company’s confidence in its findings has only increased after further research and probing following its announcement in early September that 3,000 ads were bought by 470 fake accounts on its platform.
Schrage’s post also addressed a number of questions about how Facebook had identified the ads and what it was doing to stop foreign nationals from meddling in American politics. Also, the social networking giant is facing increasing pressure from the United States authorities to ramp up the security regulations. The announcement came as the leading social network turned over to Congress some 3,000 Russia-linked ads that appeared to use hot-button issues to turn people against one another ahead of the USA election.
The latest company statement said that about 25 percent of the ads were never shown to anyone.
They used a tool called Custom Audiences to “retarget” people who had visited the sites with specific ads and messages, the Washington Post reports.
Some of the ads reportedly included anti-Muslim messages.
MI and Wisconsin are two of the twelve perennial swing states that are regularly seen as close contests during presidential elections.
Burr said that Kushner’s camp had responded to the letter to state they had in fact turned over “every email that was pertinent to the investigation”. The company has promised to share its findings with Congressional investigators.
Mr Zuckerberg has been heavily criticised over recent months, over the social network’s role in the 2016 US Presidential election.
“The 2016 U.S. election was the first where evidence has been widely reported that foreign actors sought to exploit the internet to influence voter behavior”, Schrage wrote. In this case, there was no hacking involved, it was just ads being bought through an ad platform; some may have infringed Facebook’s rules, but it certainly isn’t hacking, at least in this particular case. In May, it said it would hire 3,000 more people to speed up the removal of videos showing murder, suicide and other violent acts that shocked users.
Sources told the outlet on Tuesday that the Russians sent out a series of messages that were meant to divide residents, including anti-Muslim posts.
Facebook handed over to Congress roughly 3,000 ads with links to Russian Federation on Monday.
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Burr said he considers the ads committee-sensitive documents. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has sketched out advances that the organization intends to take to discourage governments from manhandling the web-based social networking system, the worlds biggest.
