13/12/2017 Facebook criticised for response to questions on Russia and Brexit | Technology | The Guardian

Facebook criticised for response to questions on

Russia and Brexit
Chair of Commons committee says rm has not answered questions put to Mark Zuckerberg about troll
army activity

Alex Hern
Wednesday 13 December 2017 16.51GMT

Facebook has been slammed for failing to do any extra work in its investigation into Russian
inuence on the EU referendum, after the companys inquiry found just $0.97 (0.72) of ad
spending originating from the notorious Russian troll army.

Damian Collins MP, the chair of the House of Commons digital, culture, media and sport select
committee, said the companys initial response to the Electoral Commission does not answer the
questions that I put to Mark Zuckerberg.

Facebook conducted its own research to identify tens of thousands of fake pages and accounts
that were active during the French presidential election, Collins said. They should do the same
looking back at the EU referendum and not just rely on external sources referring evidence of
suspicious activity back to them.
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The social network released the information to the Electoral Commission on Wednesday, in
response to the organisations investigation into campaign activity funded from outside the UK.
Just 200 people in Britain saw the adverts, Facebook said, which cost Russias notorious troll
factory, the Internet Research Agency, just $0.97 to deliver.

We have examined whether any of the identied Internet Research Agency (IRA) pages or
account proles funded advertisements to audiences in the United Kingdom during the regulated
period for the EU referendum, Facebook said in a letter to the Electoral Commission, shared with
the Guardian.

We have determined that these accounts associated with the IRA spent a small amount of money
($0.97) on advertisements that delivered to UK audiences during that time. This amount resulted
in three advertisements (each of which were also targeted to US audiences and concerned
immigration, not the EU referendum) delivering approximately 200 impressions to UK viewers
over four days in May 2016.

Google and Twitter were also asked to submit evidence of paid activity to the Electoral
Commission. Google has conrmed that it found none, and a spokesperson told the Guardian:
We took a thorough look at our systems and found no evidence of this activity on our platform.

Twitter says it only identied one Russian account buying referendum-related adverts: the
nations foreign broadcaster, Russia Today, which spend just over $1,000 on six adverts. Among
the accounts that we have previously identied as likely funded from Russian sources, we have
thus far identied one account@RT_com which promoted referendum-related content during
the regulated period, the company said in its letter to Collins, seen by the Guardian.

$1,031.99 was spent on six referendum-related ads during the regulated period. On 26 October
2017, Twitter announced that it would no longer accept advertisements from RT and Sputnik and
will donate the $1.9 million that RT had spent globally on advertising on Twitter to academic
research into elections and civil engagement, Twitter added.

An Electoral Commission spokesperson said: Facebook, Google and Twitter have responded to
us. We welcome their cooperation. There is further work to be done with these companies in
response to our request for details of campaign activity on their platforms funded from outside
the UK. Following those discussions we will say more about our conclusions.

The commissions investigation is limited to potentially unlawful campaign spending, while the
inquiry led by Collins is taking a broader look at the issue.

He said Facebooks initial response was far too narrow in scope, and only looked at the suspicious
activity uncovered in an earlier investigation into the US, rather than starting afresh and looking
for accounts created to skew debate in Britain.

I asked Facebook to provide the committee with details relating to any adverts and pages paid
for, or set up by, Russian-linked accounts, Collins said. In their response to the Electoral
Commission, Facebook responded only with regards to funded advertisements to audiences in
the UK from the around 470 accounts and pages run by the Russian-based Internet Research
Agency, which had been active during the US presidential election.

It would appear that no work has been done by Facebook to look for Russian activity around the
EU referendum, other than from funded advertisements from those accounts that had already
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13/12/2017 Facebook criticised for response to questions on Russia and Brexit | Technology | The Guardian

been identied as part of the US Senates investigation. No work has been done by Facebook to
look for other fake accounts and pages that could be linked to Russian-backed agencies and which
were active during the EU referendum, as I requested.

Are we to believe that Russian-backed targeting of voters through social media with fake news
was limited only to Twitter during the referendum, when both Twitter and Facebook had been
used in the USA during the presidential election?

In the US, when Twitter looked for accounts seemingly run by the IRA that were heavily involved
in the discussion around the US general election, it found more than 2,700. Many of those
accounts had been regularly cited in the media as apparently real American voters, a Guardian
analysis showed, with Russian-authored tweets being quoted more than 80 times in the British
media alone.

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