Facebook will turn over thousands of Russian ads

Company used 470 fake accounts to buy $100K of political advertisements

Facebook on Thursday announced it would turn over to Congress copies of more than 3,000 politically themed advertisements bought through Russian accounts during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, reversing a decision that had frustrated lawmakers.

The company has been struggling for months to address the steadily mounting evidence that Russians manipulated the social media platform in their bid to tip the presidential election in favor of Republican Donald Trump.

Democratic lawmakers in recent days had demanded that Facebook be more open about what it knows and to dig more deeply into its troves of data to analyze the propaganda effort, which the company has acknowledged involved at least 470 fake accounts created by a shadowy Russian company that spent more than $100,000 targeting U.S. voters. Lawmakers particularly wanted copies of the ads bought through the fake accounts, some of which Facebook officials showed to Hill investigators and took away, making further study impossible. The company said sharing the ads would compromise privacy of users.

Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg announced a reversal of that decision Thursday, saying that the company believed it could share the ads with Congress without compromising user privacy. The company already had shared at least some of the same information with Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

“I care deeply about the democratic process and protecting its integrity,” Zuckerberg said on Facebook Live, a video streaming service provided by the company. “Facebook’s mission is all about giving people a voice and bringing people closer together. Those are deeply democratic values, and we’re proud of them. I don’t want anyone to use our tools to undermine democracy. That’s not what we stand for.”

The company has been slow to respond to signs, dating to November, that Russians used Facebook and other technology platforms to deliver propoganda and manipulate voter sentiment. As evidence has grown, lawmakers have pushed the company and others to search more deeply and more quickly for answers — to determine what happened in 2016 and to head off a repeat in future elections.