Facebook: Little sign Russia had Brexit vote sway

It says agency bought 3 ads that Brits viewed 200 times

LONDON — Facebook, confounding expectations, said Wednesday that the company had found no evidence of a significant Russian effort to interfere in the United Kingdom’s referendum last year about leaving the European Union.

The government-linked Russian organization accused of using social media to seek to influence the United States presidential election in 2016, the Internet Research Agency, spent only 97 cents on Facebook advertisements that were delivered to British users during the two months before the referendum, Facebook said in an emailed statement.

That bought three ads, and all were centered on immigration and aimed at American users, Facebook said. The ads were viewed 200 times by British users over four days in May 2016, the company said. The referendum took place June 23, 2016.

The possibility remains that Russia found other ways to use social media around the referendum.

Facebook’s statement came as an unrelated Oxford study set to be released this week appeared to confirm that Russia made little effort to influence the vote through social media platforms including Twitter and YouTube.

“Overall, I think the Russian activity during Brexit seems to have been minimal,” said an author of the study, professor Philip Howard of the Oxford Internet Institute, which studies online propaganda. “The real source of misinformation about the Brexit debate was homegrown.”

Facebook made its statement in response to questions from the British Parliament about any Russian efforts to use social media to influence the United Kingdom’s vote, expanding on several parallel American congressional investigations around the election of President Donald Trump.

Damian Collins, the Conservative chairman of the parliamentary committee that requested the information, called Facebook’s answer insufficient.

In an emailed statement, Collins said he had asked Facebook for details about “any adverts and pages paid for or set up by Russian-linked accounts,” but in response Facebook provided information on only about 470 accounts and pages run by the Internet Research Agency and active during the U.S. election.

“It would appear that no work has been done by Facebook to look for Russian activity around the EU referendum, other than from funded advertisements from those accounts that had already been identified as part of the U.S. Senate’s investigation,” he said.

Collins said he was continuing to press Facebook for information about “Russian activity linked to the 2017 general election, as well as the EU referendum.”

There was no immediate explanation for the stark contrast with the Russian approach to the U.S. election. Facebook has told congressional committees investigating the matter that the Internet Research Agency had spent more than $100,000 on ads that reached 126 million users in its effort to influence the American vote.

The social media giant told Congress that the Russian agency had posted roughly 80,000 pieces of divisive content that were shown to about 29 million people between January 2015 and August 2017, and that those posts were liked, shared and followed by others — reaching tens of millions more people.

Facebook also said it had found and deleted more than 170 accounts on its photo-sharing app, Instagram; those accounts had posted about 120,000 pieces of Russia-linked content.