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Facebook Will Share Copies of Political Ads Purchased by Russian Sources With the US Congress (recode.net)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Facebook will turn over copies of political ads purchased by Russian sources to congressional lawmakers, who are investigating the country's potential interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Initially, Facebook had only released those ads -- 3,000 of them, valued at about $100,000 -- to Robert Mueller, the former FBI director who is spearheading the government's probe into Russia's actions. Facebook had withheld those details from House and Senate leaders, citing privacy concerns. But the move drew sharp rebukes from the likes of Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, who has charged in recent days that Facebook may not have done enough to scan its systems for potential Russian influence and to ensure that such foreign purchases -- otherwise illegal under U.S. law -- don't happen again. "After an extensive legal and policy review, today we are announcing that we will also share these ads with congressional investigators," wrote Colin Stretch, the company's general counsel. "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."
Didn't the Obama administration do something similar to the Israelis?
How come I never heard any kind of investigation? And by the way, it was to the legitimate government of a sovereign state. An ally of ours if I may add.
There are a lot of reasons to bash FB, and you're free to bash the Zuck himself, but what are you worried about here? That FB might alter or withhold ads? Seems unlikely. This seems like a positive move and I can't think of a reason to hold it against FB.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
So the Facebook report states that $100,000 worth of ads were bought over a 2 year period from accounts suspected to have been operated from Russia. Also these ads were:
- without specific geographic targeting (only 25% we so targeted)
- without targeting specific candidates
- vaguely meant to spread division in the society (what does that even mean?)
Somehow this got blown into "Russia was subverting democracy in the US". It's OK for Sheldon Adelson, Koch brothers and such to throw millions in on their PACs and hold auditions for GOP candidates, that's just free speech, no subversion of democracy there. But here we have the flimsiest of evidences that somebody (could have been from anywhere, even US) paid somebody from Russia $100,000 to do some vague anti-LGBT, racist, anti-immigration campaign not specifically targeted at any candidate or Americans, suddenly this requires a massive investigation. Has everybody lost their minds?
so you think, without any legally admissible evidence, but with lots of speculations based on other speculations, with no known and discernible direct technique for changing the minds of hundreds of thousands of voters(at least), russians, and pro immigrant globalist zuckerberg, stole the election, for benefit of anti immigrant militaristic nationalist trump, through fake news and online ads worth $100000("lot of money")?
all the while, several fold more well funded (not counting the money from saudi arabia, qatar, israel, ukraine, etc), hillray, had the support of legacy media, big tech and social media corps(including almost every top leader at facebook, google, etc), big banks, hollywood, state apparatus(from president obama down), overt moral support(at least) of european and asian leaders(do i have to mention mexico and canada? ), and tacit support of republican establishment (and open support of never trumper neocons).
lol.
who did you say "can't think for (himself)"?
feel free. lol.