Facebook ad blitz traced to Russia
UNITED STATES: Facebook representatives have told US House and Senate investigators that a Russian company linked to a Kremlin intelligence operation used fake accounts to buy about US$150,000 worth of advertising posts targeting voters during the 2016 presidential campaign, people familiar with the matter say.
But a Facebook official said its search was intended to serve only as a starting point, and was limited to accounts that could easily be traced to Russian actors - for example, if they were written in Russian or had a Russian internet address.
The discovery, revealed to investigators for the congressional intelligence committees yesterday, is the first confirmation that the social media giant was at least an oblique tool of Russia’s election meddling campaign aimed at putting Donald Trump in the White House.
The company’s chief security officer, Alex Stamos, said few of the roughly 3000 ads found in its initial review, purchased over a two-year period beginning in June 2015, referenced the presidential campaign, and only about 25 per cent were geographically targeted. The ads focused ‘‘on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum’’, including gun rights and immigration, he said.
The disclosure, first reported by The Washington Post, is sure to fuel calls for a deeper review by Facebook into whether Russia may have used other front companies or non-profit groups to con- ceal the purchase of additional sponsored ads carrying harshly critical or fake news about Trump’s Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.
A Facebook official who declined to be identified said the ad purchases were traced to a maze of fake accounts emanating from a single company connected to a Russian ‘‘troll farm’’ in St Petersburg that US intelligence agencies have accused of circulating false information or propaganda that tended to benefit Trump.
Facebook has come under intense pressure to take steps to ensure it does not become an easy vehicle for spreading falsehoods about political candidates.
The congressional committees and a Justice Department special counsel, Robert Mueller, are investigating whether Trump’s presidential campaign may have colluded with Russia’s massive cyberattack.
Virginia Senator Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the panel was looking hard at Facebook’s role. ‘‘Clearly, if you look at Facebook’s response or non-response around our election versus how Facebook dealt with similar attacks around fake news in the French election, there were very different results,’’ he said.
Facebook took aggressive steps in advance of France’s presidential election last year to intercept and take down spam accounts that were spreading fake news.
Warner said Facebook could determine who bought sponsored ads related to an election, which buyers were political campaigns, and which were ‘‘third parties’’ that might have concealed Russian involvement.
The company, which has been a staunch guardian of its clients’ privacy, has yet to say whether it would identify any such third parties to Congress or the special counsel’s office. A spokesman said only: ‘‘We are cooperating with the investigations.’’
Stamos said the social media giant was able to trace the ads to 470 inauthentic Facebook accounts and pages created ‘‘in violation of our policies’’.
‘‘Our analysis suggests these accounts and pages were affiliated with one another and likely operated out of Russia,’’ he said.
- TNS