Facebook Says 10 Million US Users Saw Russia-linked Ads (reuters.com)

Some 10 million people in the United States saw politically divisive ads on Facebook that the company said were purchased in Russia in the months before and after last year's U.S. presidential election, Facebook said on Monday. From a report: Facebook, which had not previously given such an estimate, said in a statement that it used modeling to estimate how many people saw at least one of the 3,000 ads. It also said that 44 percent of the ads were seen before the November 2016 election and 56 percent were seen afterward. The ads have sparked anger toward Facebook and, within the United States, toward Russia since the world's largest social network disclosed their existence last month. Moscow has denied involvement with the ads.

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Re:FFS

[AmiMoJo]

It's part of a campaign to destabilize and weaken the west. Brexit is another outcome of their social media attacks. They tried to influence the recent French election with hacking and leaks, but the eventual winners saw it coming and fed them fake documents. They have been involved in posting a lot of fake news about Germany as well, supporting the far-right there.

A lot of this could easily have been stopped if social media companies had been paying attention, or even our own security services had been looking instead of drowning in bulk data collection. For example, many Russian fake accounts were found on Twitter when people did a simple analysis of posting times and noticed that they matched Moscow office hours when the person was supposed to be in the UK. AntiFa Boston was known to be fake from the start, but it wasn't until they accidentally posted location tags (Moscow again) that the account was removed. I bet Twitter can see those tags even when they are not made public.