Facebook will tell lawmakers that approximately 126 million people may have seen content generated and promoted by a Kremlin-linked Russian troll farm, according to several reports published late Monday.
CNN and the Washington Post reported, citing drafts of Facebook’s written testimony before Congress, that the website’s general counsel Colin Stretch will tell lawmakers that 29 million people directly received content generated by the Internet Research Agency, a Russian firm.
Stretch will tell lawmakers that “approximately 126 million people” may have seen that content, according to CNN and the Washington Post, though Facebook does not know how many people actually saw the posts in question.
Earlier in October, Facebook estimated that 10 million people saw advertisements the Internet Research Agency bought on the website over the course of the 2016 campaign.
According to CNN and the Washington Post, that number did not account for posts the Russian firm did not pay to promote.
Facebook, Twitter and Google said last week that they will send representatives to a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing scheduled to take place on Tuesday regarding Russian interference in the 2016 election.
That’s 1 in 3 Americans, children included.
I say we shut the POS down.
Any company that makes a significant portion of its revenue through advertising has to be looked at with a jaundiced eye. We already know Facebook, Twitter, and Google were complicit by looking the other way as Russia meddled in our elections. They’ve clearly shown they cannot be trusted and have no interest in safeguarding our democracy. Regulations are a-coming and the stricter, the better.
Even really basic regulations like disclosure would have caught a bunch of this.
Hillary Clinton: 65,853,625 votes
Donald Trump: 62,985,106 votes
Total: 128,838,731 votes
Nice work FaceBook, you potentially let the entirety of the voting population be influeced by illegal foreign bots and advertisements, something they could have very easily blocked and/or alerted their users to.
No wonder Mark Zuckerberg has been on a brand-cleansing tour the past 9 months.
FaceBook should be shut down and Zuckerberg should be investigated for allowing foreign agents to meddle in our elections.
And after the election he called the idea “crazy”. Now, not so much.
BTW does Zuckerberg own any shirts other that gray tee shirts. Just wonderin’.