Facebook: Russian group posted more than 80,000 times

Firm will state up to 126M users reached during, after election.

Facebook says a Russian group posted more than 80,000 times on its service during and after 2016 election, poten-

reaching as many as 126 million users.

The company plans to disclose these numbers to the Senate Judiciary Committee today, according to a person familiar with the testimony. The person declined to be named because the committee has not officially released the testimony. Facebook, Twitter and Google will testify at three hearings today and Wednesday.

Colin Stretch, Facebook’s general counsel, plans to tell the Judiciary panel that 120 pages set up by Russia’s Internet Research Agency posted the material between January 2015 and August 2017. The company estimates that roughly 29 million peo- ple were directly “served” these items in their news feeds from the agency over that time period.

Some of those people received the posts because they liked one of the agen- cy’s pages, or because a Face- book friend liked or commented on a post. Others shared the Russia-linked posts, helping them spread widely.

Stretch’s prepared testi- mony makes clear that many of the 126 million people reached this way may not have seen the posts. People may not have logged in when it was available, or they may have looked right past it. The company says the total number of agency posts accounted for less than 1 of every 23,000 posts on Facebook.

These “organic” posts that appeared in users’ news feeds are distinct from more than 3,000 advertisements linked to the agency that Facebook has already turned over to congressional committees. The ads — many of which focused on divisive social issues — pointed people to the agency’s pages, where they could then like or share its material.

In the testimony, Stretch says the discovery of Russian interference has “opened a new battleground for our company, our industry and our society,” and says Facebook is determined that it not happen again. “What these actors did goes against everything Facebook stands for,” Stretch says.

The company has said it will take steps to fix the problem, with an announcement last week that they will verify political ad buyers in federal elections and build transparency tools in which all advertisers will be associated with a page. Twitter has also said it will require election-related ads for candidates to disclose who is paying for them and how they are targeted, and announced last month that it will ban ads from RT and Sputnik, two state-sponsored Russian news outlets.

Stretch says the company was aware of — and reported to law enforcement — threats from actors with ties to Russia before last year’s election. He says that includes activity from a cluster of accounts that the company assessed belonged to a group called “APT28” that has been linked to Russian military intelligence.

He says the company “warned the targets who were at highest risk.”