Unic Press UK: As congressional committee continues its investigation on Russia’s influence on the U.S 2016 presidential election, Facebook said it will release to the United States Congress thousands of ads sold to Russian-linked companies.
During a question/answer session, Facebook’s Vice President of Policy and Communications, Elliot Schrage, said:
“… this is an extraordinary investigation — one that raises questions that go to the integrity of the US elections. After an extensive legal and policy review, we’ve concluded that sharing the ads we’ve discovered with Congress, in a manner that is consistent with our obligations to protect user information, will help government authorities complete the vitally important work of assessing what happened in the 2016 election.”
On why Facebook will share the data with the Special Counsel and Congress to the exclusion of the public, Schrage said:
Facebook’s chief security officer Alex Stamos had disclosed on 6th September 2017 that the social media leviathan found that circa $100,000 in ads spending from June 2015 to May 2017 [linked with approximately 3,000 ads] seemed to be linked to 470 inauthentic accounts and Pages in violation of Facebook’s policies. The company claims that the ads were purchased by a shadowy Russian company.
