Russian ‘misinformation’ campaign discovered on Facebook

Given the US prohibition on foreign money being spent in elections, Facebook has a legal duty to act if it is aware of similar activity in the future, Fischer said.

It’s worth noting that $100,000 worth of ads over a two year period is nothing compared to what actual political campaigns spend.

Facebook didn’t specify in its blog post whether it kept the revenue it made from the ads. Alex explains the alleged role of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. The company documented similar techniques in a report back in April. The paper outlined and highlighted the understanding of organized attempts to misuse the social media platform.

Facebook was accused of inflating its advertising reach around the same time Facebook’s discovery came on the news. The company’s financial motivations can have serious political ramifications. The ads, which cost a total of about $100,000 and were placed between June 2015 through May 2017, violated the company’s policies.

Helderman, who broke the story on Wednesday, pointed out that “the ad spending from Russian Federation is tiny relative to overall campaign costs”. These sponsored FB posts, in turn, were used to “target” American voters, either by directly naming presidential candidates or by focusing on “politically divisive issues”.

Stamos said these findings have been shared with US authorities, violating accounts have been deleted, and Facebook is working on ways to prevent similar abuses in the future, such as taking measures to limit spam and blocking pages that repeatedly share false stories from advertising on Facebook.

Facebook said the total sum of Russian-based ads geared at influencing the election was approximately $100,000, a small amount in the scope of ad sales in the U.S. presidential election.

Citing anonymous sources “familiar with the company’s findings”, the newspaper suggested a handful of the ads directly named then-nominees Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

About 25 percent of the ads were geographically targeted. The recent findings by the company net together with political deformities that were depicted in the ads.

“If, as some people have alleged, the Trump campaign coordinated with the Russian government as to the placement of ads, using data that Trump’s campaign collected, that would be clearly illegal”, he added. Since these ads depicted a deep knowledge of state-level American politics it has raised many eyebrows.

The social network released a statement on Wednesday, addressing claims that Russian Federation had interfered in the U.S. presidential election. The page is registered to a fake account in Russian Federation named “troll farm”. He also wants to know if the content of the ads smacked of Russian propaganda. KGB is also said to have a connection. It deleted 30,000 accounts in the run-up to the French national election in May, an event that allegedly also involved fake accounts linked to Russian Federation.

So, now for a fix, other leaders and Zuckerberg will have to turn to Congress, whilst lawmakers may also look forward to Facebook to get answers on Russian meddling.