Facebook reverses itself on Russia ads
Company: Will give materials to panels in Congress
WASHINGTON — Responding to mounting pressure to reveal details about Russian-paid propaganda on its platform, Facebook said it would share more than 3,000 ads linked to Russia with congressional panels investigating foreign meddling in the 2016 election.
The move announced Thursday is a reversal for Facebook, which previously showed staffers on Capital Hill only snippets of the ads before taking them back, citing user privacy.
Facebook had given the ads and other information to special counsel Robert Mueller, who is also looking into possible Trump campaign ties to Russia. But the company has been facing growing calls to assist congressional investigators after first publicly acknowledging on Sept. 6 that it had accepted at least $100,000 in Russia-linked ads.
“We believe it is vitally important that government authorities have the information they need to deliver to the public a full assessment of what happened in the 2016 election,” Colin Stretch, Facebook’s general counsel, said in a blog post Thursday.
Facebook co-founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg discussed the disclosure during a live broadcast in which he also pledged to strengthen the company’s ad review process and instill more transparency in political advertising on his platform.
“I don’t want anyone to use our tools to undermine democracy. That’s not what we stand for,” Zuckerberg said. “The integrity of our elections is fundamental to democracy around the world.”
The ads were purchased by 470 fake accounts traced back to the Internet Research Agency, a Russian firm known for using troll accounts to post on news sites.
Facebook executives briefed the Senate intelligence committee earlier this month on the Russia-linked ads.
But Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the committee, and other lawmakers had criticized the company for refusing to turn over the materials that it had given to Mueller.
Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the senior Democrat on the House intelligence committee, said in a statement that the Facebook material “should help us better understand what happened, beyond the preliminary briefings we already received.”
He added, “It will be important for the committee to scrutinize how rigorous Facebook’s internal investigation has been, to test its conclusions and to understand why it took as long as it did to discover the Russian sponsored advertisements and what else may yet be uncovered.”
Schiff made clear that Facebook is not the only company that investigators expect to hear from.
“As we continue our investigation to get to the bottom of Russia’s multifaceted attack on our democratic process,” he said, “I believe it will be necessary to hear directly from Facebook, Google and Twitter, as well as others in the tech sector, including in open hearings that will inform the American public.”
No evidence has emerged publicly to indicate there was coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.
But the use of social media was part of a broad effort by the Kremlin to influence the presidential election, U.S. intelligence agencies said in a January report. It concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered the campaign to help Trump and damage Clinton.
The intelligence report found that Russian social media users had posted messages hostile to Clinton. But the impact of the Facebook ads on the election remains unclear, current and former officials said.
“The Russians have long considered information operations like this to be part of their foreign policy tool box,” said J. Michael Daniel, a former senior cybersecurity official in the Obama administration. “But they’re not necessarily seeking to elect an individual; they’re seeking to sow division, to sow distrust.”