An estimated 126 million Americans, roughly one-third of the nation’s population, received Russian-backed content on Facebook during the 2016 campaign, according to prepared testimony the company submitted Monday to the Senate Judiciary Committee and obtained by NBC News.
Underscoring how widely content on the social media platform can spread, Facebook says in the testimony that while some 29 million Americans directly received material from 80,000 posts by 120 fake Russian-backed pages in their own news feeds, those posts were “shared, liked and followed by people on Facebook, and, as a result, three times more people may have been exposed to a story that originated from the Russian operation.”
The testimony by Facebook's general counsel, Colin Stretch, was submitted to the Judiciary Committee ahead of a hearing on Tuesday with executives from Facebook, Google and Twitter. The hearing is part of the congressional inquiry into Russia’s use of these platforms to try to influence last year’s U.S. presidential election.
Facebook was not the only social media platform to provide stunning evidence of Russia's interference during the 2016 campaigns.
Courtesy of the New York Times:
Twitter, in its prepared remarks, said it had discovered more than 2,700 accounts on its service that were linked to the Internet Research Agency between September 2016 and November 2016. Those accounts, which Twitter has suspended, posted roughly 131,000 tweets over that period.
Outside of the activity of the Internet Research Agency, Twitter identified more than 36,000 automated accounts that posted 1.4 million election-related tweets linked to Russia over that three-month period. The tweets received approximately 288 million views, according to the company’s remarks.
I think we can do away with the talking point that Russia only paid about $150,000 to influence our election. They clearly paid significantly more than that.
This was a very large, and very coordinated effort to do three things.
Divide Americans and get them fighting one another, defeat Hillary Clinton, and help to elect Donald Trump.
And to their credit they manage to accomplish all three.
Source http://ift.tt/2zmp9it
