United States Lawmakers had released a trove of ads on Facebook which were linked to a Russian rubles to disrupt the 20016 American Presidential election.
The day after the revelation by the lawmakers, US Senators have raised a question against investigation team of the company. They have asked the company to clarify why they took so long and how much it knows about its 5 million advertisers.
Facebook is not the only company who had run Russian related ads, the list includes Facebook, Google, and Twitter. All these companies had received flaks on for not able to combat Russian interference on their sites.
Facebook had admitted that they identified more than $100,000 were paid for the advertisements by the Russian Internet Research Agency.
The Russia-linked advertisements were “an insidious attempt to drive people apart,” Colin Stretch, the general counsel for Facebook who will appear at the hearings, said in his prepared remarks. He called the posts “deeply disturbing,” and their main focus was race, religion, gun rights, and gay and transgender issues.
Mr. Stretch said that they are “determined to prevent it from happening again.”
While Twitter found more than 1.4 million Russia-linked election tweets.
Facebook has a broader impact has its reach is much more than that of the Twitter network and is more powerful than Google.