FB to deliver Russia-linked ads to US Congress
UNDER intensifying scrutiny from federal investigators and the public, Facebook said Sunday that it planned to turn over more than 3,000 Russianlinked advertisements to congressional investigators yesterday.
The decision, which comes after a week of scathing calls from Congress for details about Facebook’s advertising system, is the latest attempt by a major technology company to disclose the scope of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Last week, Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook, vowed to work with investigators and other technology companies in an attempt to snuff out the spread of false news stories and bogus accounts across their sites. It is a growing threat that Facebook and similar companies have begun to come to terms with only in recent months.
“It is a new challenge for internet communities to deal with nation-states attempting to subvert elections,” Zuckerberg said in a live video address on Facebook last week. “But if that’s what we must do, we are committed to rising to the occasion.”
Facebook has yet to disclose the types of advertisements and content the company will hand over. But news reports have linked the posts to issues such as religion, race, gun ownership and other politically charged topics.
Mark Warner, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has been a fierce critic of Facebook and other companies for not disclosing the extent to which foreign agents had a hand in shaping the outcome of the 2016 election.
Congress has also raised the possibility of regulation of political advertising across social media sites. Last month, congressional Democrats asked the Federal Election Commission to advise on ways to prevent illicit foreign influence on US elections via social media. Facebook, Twitter and Google – unlike television, print and radio – are not bound by law to disclose who purchases their ads.
In an attempt to pre-empt such reg- ulation, Facebook has pledged to overhaul its advertising systems to give more insight into the identity of those who purchase political ads on the network. In the future, Zuckerberg said, there would be ways for users to view all of the political ads connected to a particular advertiser on Facebook.
Facebook is not the only such technology company under such scrutiny. In a meeting with congressional investigators last week, Twitter disclosed that it had deleted hundreds of Russian-linked accounts on its platform. Google, too, is in the midst of conducting an internal investigation into whether its advertising products played a role in Russian interference in the election.