Facebook executive walks back tweets on Russia

Comments added to the pressure over site’s role in election meddling

Facebook’s head of advertising, Rob Goldman, has apologized after a tweetstorm that seemed to downplay Russian interference in U.S. elections on the heels of indictments made by special counsel Robert Mueller late last week.

Goldman, who the company said was acting on his own and not on behalf of Facebook, tweeted Friday, “I have seen all of the Russian ads and I can say very definitively that swaying the election was *NOT* the main goal.”

Mueller’s indictments accuse the Russians of trying to affect the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, and it is unclear why the Facebook executive could say with certainty he knew what the Russians’ intent was.

“Nothing we found contradicts the Special Counsel’s indictments,” said

Joel Kaplan, vice president of global policy for Facebook, in a statement passed along by a Facebook spokesman Tuesday. “Any suggestion otherwise is wrong.”

President Trump seized on Goldman’s tweets over the weekend, using them as an opportunity to lash out at the media. He tweeted: “The Fake News Media never fails. Hard to ignore this fact from the Vice President of Facebook Ads, Rob Goldman!”

Trump was referring to Goldman’s tweet about the majority of Russian ad spending happening after the election — and the mainstream media’s supposed lack of coverage of it — but in a fact check of those tweets, the New York Times points out that the media has reported that “44 percent of the Russian-bought ads were displayed before the 2016 election, while 56 percent were shown afterward.”

Goldman’s tweets add to the pressure and backlash Facebook is already facing over its role in the spread of misinformation that, according to growing evidence, may have affected the outcome of the election.

The Russian nationals indicted last week were charged with working with the Internet Research Agency — a Russian troll farm that used Facebook, Twitter and other online platforms to create social media accounts that spread fake news, impersonated Americans, placed ads that were mostly antiHillary Clinton, and more.

Goldman’s tweets were condemned on Twitter and elsewhere, with some tweeters responding that Facebook profited from the Russian campaign of misinformation.

“The public is upset that they got duped on Facebook’s platform,” said Clint Watts, a fellow with the Foreign Policy Research Institute who studied the Russian influence campaign, according to the Wall Street Journal. “Mr. Goldman should have stayed silent.”

Not all the reactions to Goldman’s tweets were negative. Some tweeters agreed with his tweet that Americans are divided; that others besides Facebook deserve some of the blame; and that, as Goldman tweeted, “Disinformation is ineffective against a well educated citizenry.”

Still, “I conveyed my view poorly,” Goldman said in an apology posted internally, according to Wired. “The Special Counsel has far more information about what happened I do — so seeming to contradict his statements was a serious mistake on my part.”