Facebook to hand over Trump-Russia campaign ads to investigators

Friday, 22 September 2017

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg goes live online to say Russia-linked ads aimed at inflaming tensions around last year's US presidential election will be handed to investigators.

Facebook said on Friday that it would turn over to Congress copies of more than 3000 advertisements linked to a shadowy Russian company, for House and Senate committees' investigations of Kremlin interference in the 2016 United States election.

The move is an about-face for Facebook, which earlier this month said it had given the ads and other information to lawyer Robert Mueller, who is conducting a criminal investigation of possible links between Russia and the Trump campaign.

But Facebook has said it could not give the material to Congress due to privacy concerns.

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has been criticised for not handing over the Russian-funded ads earlier, but his company's defence says it was previously a privacy issue.

Most of the ads did not mention Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, but focused on immigration, gun control, gay rights and other divisive social issues.

Lawyers are investigating Russian-funded social media content about United States president Donald Trump's views on immigration and gun control during his 2016 election campaign.

They were purchased by 470 fake accounts traced back to the Internet Research Agency, a Russian firm known for using troll accounts to post on news sites.

'After an extensive legal and policy review, today we are announcing that we will also share these ads with congressional investigators,' said Colin Stretch, Facebook's lawyer, in a blog post.

'We believe it is vitally important that government authorities have the information they need to deliver to the public a full assessment of what happened in the 2016 election.'

Facebook's chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, said that the company was taking steps to provide more transparency about political ads that run on the site and to prevent covert attempts to influence elections.

He said Facebook would continue to investigate attempts by Russia and other 'foreign actors' to use the site to interfere in other countries' elections.

'I don't want anyone to use our tools to undermine democracy. That's not what we stand for,' Zuckerberg said in a video statement.

Facebook executives had briefed the Senate Intelligence Committee earlier this month on the Russian-linked ads.

But senator Mark Warner of Virginia and other lawmakers had criticised the company for refusing to turn over the materials it had given to Mueller.

Representative Adam Schiff of California, the senior democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement that the Facebook material 'should help us better understand what happened, beyond the preliminary briefings we already received'.

'It will be important for the committee to scrutinise how rigorous Facebook's internal investigation has been, to test its conclusions and to understand why it took as long as it did to discover the Russian-sponsored advertisements and what else may yet be uncovered.'

Schiff made it clear that Facebook was not be the only company that investigators expected to hear from.

'As we continue our investigation to get to the bottom of Russia's multifaceted attack on our democratic process,' he said, 'I believe it will be necessary to hear directly from Facebook, Google and Twitter, as well as others in the technology sector, including in open hearings that will inform the American public.'

- Los Angeles Times