Russian agents created 129 events on Facebook during the 2016 presidential elections, a revelation that comes after Facebook Inc officials testified to Congress.
A written statement from Facebook sent to U.S. lawmakers on Thursday said that 338,300 different Facebook accounts viewed the events and 62,500 marked that they would attend. The social media network added that it had no data about which of the events took place.
Previously in September, the world’s largest social media network said that Russians had created only “several promoted events.”
According to Reuters, Facebook said that it had found “overlap” between the online marketing done in 2016 by Russian agents and by President Donald Trump’s campaign and called it “insignificant.” The company said it was not in a position to either substantiate or disprove allegations of collusion between the two camps.
Trump regularly denies any kind of collusion between his campaign and Russia calling special counsel Mueller’s investigation a “witch hunt.”
Reuters reported that around 126 million Americans may have seen Russian-backed political content on Facebook over a two-year period and that 16 million may have been exposed to Russian information on Instagram.
In October and November Facebook, Twitter Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google testified about a possible misuse of their services before three congressional committees.
Later last year, Facebook announced that it removed Kaspersky Lab from its list of free anti-virus software. Although the social media platform no longer gives Kaspersky Lab as a recommended option, it said that it was “unable to easily reconstruct how many Facebook users downloaded Kaspersky software.”
Kaspersky Lab was accused last year that enables Russian espionage on computers that use it, although Kaspersky denied the allegations the U.S. government banned the use of their products in the federal computer networks.
Be the first to comment