Facebook Identifies $100,000 In Ad Spending By Fake Accounts With Suspected Ties to Russia -- Update
September 06 2017 - 7:21PM
Dow Jones News
By Shane Harris, , Deepa Seetharaman and Byron Tau
WASHINGTON -- Facebook Inc. said it has identified about 500
"inauthentic" accounts responsible for $100,000 in advertising
spending that it believes have ties to Russia, following a review
of ad buying on the site in response to intelligence community
concerns about Russian activity during the 2016 election.
The findings mark the first time that Facebook has acknowledged
that Russian actors may have used its platform during the
presidential campaign. The conclusion is a shift from July, when a
Facebook spokesman said the company had no evidence that Russian
entities bought ads targeted at Americans on the platform during
the election season.
The social-media giant said Wednesday that the ads it identified
didn't typically reference any particular political candidate.
Rather, the company review found that the ads focused on
"amplifying divisive social and political messages across the
ideological spectrum -- touching on topics from LGBT matters to
race issues to immigration to gun rights."
Facebook officials provided their findings to House and Senate
investigators looking into Russian interference in the presidential
election, according to people familiar with the matter.
For months, congressional investigators have been probing
potential links between Russian actors and the Trump campaign's
efforts to craft messages and ads to key voters. Sen. Mark Warner,
the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has said he
is particularly interested in whether social media networks were
used to target false or misleading stories at voters in swing
districts.
Moscow has denied meddling in the U.S. election, and President
Donald Trump has denied his campaign colluded with Russia and has
called the Russia controversy a "witch hunt."
Facebook has been under fire since the 2016 campaign for what
critics described as its lax attitude toward fabricated news
reports that claimed, for example, that Pope Francis endorsed Mr.
Trump. After the election, Facebook has invested more in uprooting
misinformation from its site, including partnering with outside
fact-checkers to determine the accuracy of certain stories flagged
by users.
Facebook said Wednesday that the ads linked to Russia ran over a
two-year period, from June 2015 to May 2017. While $100,000 spent
over two years is a small sum in modern politics, the revelation
could prompt further questions about the scale and scope of
Moscow's use of social media to distribute propaganda.
A company spokesman declined to say how many Facebook users saw
or engaged with the ads purchased by Russian actors over this
period.
According to Facebook, the ads took strong stances on a range of
hot-button issues in an apparent effort to inflame public debate
and exacerbate the divide over already contentious issues.
About one-quarter of those ads were "geographically targeted,"
Facebook said, without specifying where in the U.S. they ran. And
of those ads, more ran in 2015 than in 2016, the company said,
suggesting that the Russian efforts on Facebook were aimed broadly
at fomenting discord and not engineered solely to elect a
particular candidate.
That finding is also consistent with a report last January by
U.S. intelligence agencies, which said that "pro-Kremlin social
media actors" were part of a longstanding campaign by Moscow "to
undermine the US-led liberal democratic order."
But as Election Day drew nearer, Russian propaganda efforts did
turn towards hampering Hillary Clinton's campaign and trying to
boost Donald Trump's chances of winning, the intelligence report
found.
Facebook's findings made no mention of either political
campaign. But in a report last April that didn't name Russia, the
company said social media platforms were being used "to distort
domestic or foreign political sentiment, most frequently to achieve
a strategic and/or geopolitical outcome. These operations can use a
combination of methods, such as false news, disinformation, or
networks of fake accounts aimed at manipulating public
opinion."
Beyond the 470 fake accounts responsible for the spending, the
company found another $50,000 in political ad spending by accounts
associated with U.S. internet addresses but with the language set
to Russian. It is a violation of Facebook policy to create an
"inauthentic accounts" on the platform.
The company revealed its findings in a blog post on Wednesday
and said that it was in touch with U.S. investigators about the
matter. Russian interference in the U.S. election is being probed
by several congressional committees, as well as the Federal Bureau
of Investigation under the direction of special counsel Robert
Mueller.
Political activity by foreign nations or foreign government to
influence U.S. elections in broadly prohibited by campaign finance
law. U.S. law also tightly restricts propaganda material produced
by foreign governments for domestic audiences. Content that doesn't
mention political candidates falls into a grey area.
"Foreign nationals are prohibited from giving money to federal,
state and local politicians and are prohibited from spending money
to influence American elections, directly or indirectly, but the
reality of the restriction is that it's very complicated," said
Dave Mitrani, a attorney with Sandler Reiff Lamb Rosenstein &
Birkenstock who advises Democratic candidate and campaigns on
campaign finance law.
According to the January report from the U.S. intelligence
community, the highest levels of the Russian government were
involved in directing the electoral interference to boost Mr. Trump
at the expense of his Democratic rival Mrs. Clinton. Russia's
tactics included efforts to hack state election systems;
infiltrating and leaking information from party committees and
political strategists; and disseminating through social media and
other outlets negative stories about Mrs. Clinton and positive ones
about the Mr. Trump, the report said.
Write to Deepa Seetharaman at Deepa.Seetharaman@wsj.com and
Byron Tau at byron.tau@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
September 06, 2017 19:06 ET (23:06 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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