Facebook to release 3000 Russian-bought election ads
Facebook will release to Congress the content of several thousand ads purchased by Russian operatives before the US election after coming under sustained pressure from lawmakers who criticised it for not being forthcoming about Moscow’s use of social media.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, said on Thursday that the company would share with Congress “the content and related information of the more than 3,000 ads that appear to be linked with a Russian entity known as the Internet Research Agency.”
In a live presentation on his site after his return from paternity leave, Mr Zuckerberg pledged to “work with others to create a new standard of transparency in online political ads”.
“We are going to make political advertising more transparent,” Mr Zuckerberg said. “There will always be bad people in the world, and we can’t prevent all governments from all interference. But we can make it harder. We can make it a lot harder. And that’s what we’re going to do.”
He outlined 9 steps the company was prepared to take, including protecting the intergrity of the German elections this weekend. This included taking action against thousands of fake accounts, partnering with public authorities such as the Federal Office for Information Security, and sharing security practices with the candidates and parties.
Facebook has been engulfed in a political storm over Moscow’s use of social media to meddle in US politics after revealing that Russian actors had spent at least $100,000 on roughly 3,000 “divisive” ads posted on the site between June 2015 and May 2017.
In a blog post Colin Stretch, Facebook’s general counsel, said the company had concluded that congressional investigators with access to classified information needed Facebook’s disclosures “to deliver to the public a full assessment of what happened in the 2016 election”.
Lawmakers have been delivering the same message to Facebook with growing insistence in recent days.
Mr Stretch wrote: “We believe the public deserves a full accounting of what happened in the 2016 election, and we’ve concluded that sharing the ads we’ve discovered, in a manner that is consistent with our obligations to protect user information, can help.”
In the time since its initial ad disclosure Democratic and Republican lawmakers have united to accuse Facebook of being insufficiently forthcoming. The company had not revealed what the ads looked like, what messages they contained, or how many Americans saw them.
This week the Financial Times reported that two US lawmakers with access to sensitive intelligence are expressing fears that Russia’s campaign to influence US politics via Facebook is continuing today.
https://www.ft.com/content/de59ab54-9f03-11e7-8cd4-932067fbf946