Facebook is facing intense political fallout, as well as tough legal questions a day after confirming that Russian funds paid for advertising on the social media platform aimed at influencing voters during last year’s presidential election, Politico reports.
The vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mike Warner said Thursday he hopes to call executives from Facebook, Twitter and other social media companies to testify publicly about what role their companies may have played in the wider Kremlin effort to manipulate the 2016 White House race.
“I think we may just be seeing the tip of the iceberg,” Warner said in response to Facebook’s Wednesday disclosure that apparent Russian-connected accounts spent some $150,000 on more than 5,200 political ads last year.
Facebook was also the target of a 20-minute monologue by the MSNBC host Rachel Maddow on Wednesday night, in which she noted the company’s past denials to media outlets including Time, McClatchy and CNN that it had found any Russian-bought ads.
“It raises very interesting questions about Facebook accepting that money to influence the U.S. election without noticing that it was from a foreign source,” Maddow said, adding the Russian purchasers and Americans who knew about the ad buys were now exposed to criminal proceedings.
U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Russian military intelligence officials used American social media platforms to manipulate voter opinion, and federal investigators are working to learn more about that effort, including if anyone within the U.S. might have assisted the Russian effort with political advice.
On Thursday, the government watchdog group Common Cause filed petitions with special counsel Robert Mueller and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, as well as the Federal Election Commission, seeking an investigation into that question.
“The violations of federal campaign finance law alleged in the attached complaint pose a direct threat to democracy and national security in the United States,” Paul Ryan, vice president of policy and litigation at Common Cause, wrote in his letter to Mueller and Rosenstein.
The company on Wednesday, through a blog post from its chief security officer, Alex Stamos, detailed an internal review that found a small amount of ads with Russian funding specifically mentioned Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, although most boosted divisive social and political issues like LGBT rights, race, immigration and gun rights.
Stamos added that a quarter of the Russian-linked ads were geographically targeted at specific Facebook audiences in the U.S., and most of them ran in 2015 before the first primaries and caucuses when the GOP and Democratic presidential fields were still packed with multiple candidates.
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