Russian Accounts Bought $100K in Facebook Ads During Election

In the wake of the 2022 election, when the term "faux news" had not all the same been co-opted to hateful anything with which y'all disagree, Mark Zuckerberg asserted that "the idea that false news on Facebook...influenced the election in whatever way… is a pretty crazy idea."

SecurityWatch He might want to revisit that assertion, equally Facebook today said 470 "inauthentic" accounts and Pages that "likely operated out of Russia" spent approximately $100,000 betwixt June 2022 and May 2022 on 3,000 Facebook ads.

"The vast majority of ads run by these accounts didn't specifically reference the US presidential ballot, voting or a item candidate," Alex Stamos, Facebook's Principal Security Officeholder, said in a statement. Only they did "focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages across the ideological spectrum — touching on topics from LGBT matters to race issues to immigration to gun rights."

Nigh a quarter of the ads were geographically targeted; of those, more ran in 2022 than 2022, Stamos said.

The accounts in question take since been shut downwardly, and Facebook has alerted "US regime investigating these issue."

Simulated News Fence

The fence over whether Russian federation influenced the ballot or not has raged since Nov. 8. Information technology's non a question of whether Russian hackers changed vote tallies; despite targeting election systems in at least 21 states, it does not appear that they messed with any actual votes given this land's decentralized voting process.

Instead, the question is whether Russian federation was able to spread disinformation, which ultimately influenced how people voted. Did they add together simulated data to the stolen DNC emails that were handed to WikiLeaks and posted online, in the hopes that legitimate news sources would report on it? Did they create an regular army of bots to spread fake news stories, which would be posted on Facebook past your neighbor, grandmother, or third course instructor? Did they create legitimate-sounding news outlets, mail service fake stories, push them to social networks, and hope for a viral hitting?

In November, BuzzFeed reported that fake stories generated more than date on Facebook in the last three months of the election than stories from reputable news sources. The top twenty stories on fake sites generated 8,711,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook; the top 20 stories from 19 major news outlets had vii,367,000, the site found.

To be certain, Russians were not the only ones doing this. For every group of sophisticated, Kremlin-backed hackers or Macedonian scammers, at that place were dudes from California to Maryland cooking upward fake stories they hoped would go viral. But for them, the incentive was financial; those fake sites had ads, and the more clicks they got, the more than they got paid— something Facebook and Google have cracked downwards on since the election.

For Russians, though, the goal was political. "Russia's goals were to undermine public faith in U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretarial assistant Clinton and harm her electability and potential presidency, and to help President Trump's election chances," former CIA Managing director John Brennan told Congress in May.

Since the election, Facebook has tried to stop the proliferation of faux news, from reporting tools to coalitions. Today, Stamos said the company is "exploring several new improvements to our systems for keeping inauthentic accounts and activity off our platform.

"For case, we are looking at how we tin can apply the techniques nosotros developed for detecting simulated accounts to ameliorate notice inauthentic Pages and the ads they may run. Nosotros are as well experimenting with changes to help usa more than efficiently find and stop inauthentic accounts at the time they are beingness created."

About Chloe Albanesius

Chloe Albanesius

Chloe has led PCMag's news coverage for more than than ten years, editing and writing stories about the innovations that take shaped the final decade and the companies behind them. She also oversees the site's how-to coverage. Before joining PCMag.com, Chloe was a reporter roofing tech policy on Capitol Loma for The National Periodical's Technology Daily and financial IT for Incisive Media in NYC. She's held internships at NBC'due south Meet the Press, washingtonpost.com, the Tate Gallery press office in London, Coil Call, and Congressional Quarterly. She graduated with a bachelor's caste in journalism from American University in Washington, D.C.