Lawmakers are seeking answers, and liberal groups, who say the organization failed to crack down on fake news, are seizing on the latest disclosure.
Even Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic nominee, has called the ads when considering her loss during a book tour.
“We now understand that they were sewing contention during the election with phony groups on Facebook,” Clinton told Rachel Maddow. “They were operating anti-immigrant, anti-me, anti-Hillary Clinton shows. They were setting out the fake news and negative tales untrue to actually divide people.”
Sen. Mark Warner (Va.), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, has announced the organization needs to be more future about the full length of the ad buys.
Sleeping Giants, an unknown left-leaning activist group, is setting its sights on Facebook as well. The group earned attention by pressuring 2,600 promoters to remove their ads from conventional website Breitbart and is now pushing Facebook to be more honest about how Kremlin-linked organizations used the platform.
Beyond revealing that Kremlin-linked Internet Research Group spent $100,000 purchasing ads on the social media platform in 2016, Facebook has told little else publicly.
The organization is sharing more personally with federal investigators. But lawmakers on intellect committees in the House and Senate are criticizing the Facebook still isn’t providing enough details.
“We need to get a lot further from the technology companies,” Rep. Adam Schiff (Calif.), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Friday on “Morning Joe.”
Schiff proposed Facebook has been slow to publish details because “it’s against their budgetary interest to be pushing problems about how a foreign state was exploiting their technologies.”
Warner revealed on Wednesday that Facebook had not presented that the Russian group involved had bought ads for anti-immigration and anti-Muslim rallies that they created on Facebook.
The senator only grew aware of those ads after a News report.
According to the article, the Russian group tried to rally Americans to give up at political events in Iowa and other states. Subsequent records showed that the Russian group formed a Texas fan page, which distributed pro-Texas secessionist messages. Facebook eventually took the page down.
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